Disappointment crawled inside us like some small creature trapped within the crevice of a rock. We stood, faces upturned into the darkening sky in small hope of witnessing the ellipsis of eclipse. But the clouds had come to obscure that moment. That moment of totality, swathed in a leaden, unbroken eiderdown of grey.
The eclipse arrived on time,
total, in its estimation,
and strangely, otherworldly,
the sky fell into darkness,
and we observed the eclipse,
a once-in-a-lifetime-experience;
but without a glimpse
of the paso doble
of two perfect spheres.
My children stood with me
and gazed up expectantly
as the skies dimmed
to midnight at noon;
the summer air grew chill
and birds panicked and squawked
into the trees in their confusion.
There were no other optics
except a sky the colour
of a dead television channel.
It was all over in minutes,
no checkerboard tree effects,
no spectacle for our eyes to avoid,
no pinhole camera projections.
Just a sense of anti-climax,
a total eclipse of expectations,
and a corona of speculation.
We watched an invisible eclipse,
a drama hidden
behind grey curtains.
Steve Wheeler © 28 January, 2022
