You get an eclipse in April, the whole
of the sun gone for a little while, the earth
turned to night right here and you look and watch
and think about how you are very small
in this universe and how comforting
that is. How painful, how anxiety
driven it would be to have everything be
about you. You feel your world softening.
What a respite from ego you have
in the dark of the eclipse, blocked from light.
How you wish you could take this feeling
with you everywhere. Just up and leave
your identity and be a creature in the night,
to be an animal just floating, dreaming.
John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He is a New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient for 2024, and he was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.
