Eclipse
Tick moon gorging on blood from the sun
proceeds to suck dark the impervious sky.
Blushes under scrutiny, slowly winks, shutters half an eye.
Blind to waistcoat watches, eluding expositions…
Slicing its oyster along, along
the incessant speculating tongue. Far out
novice stars, newly born, flicker excitedly.
Dim television drones on; ‘new initiatives,
forty wounded, fifteen dead’.
The Virgin kneels to annunciation, accepts
a necessary puberty and the cowl.
Darkness in the grace of yes.
PHI lippa. Letters of Love 
I don’t watch a lot of news on TV and such, but I was on the lookout for something on Big Ben following your post. Nothing. But again, I may have missed it. But the eclipse here was hyped up like it was Woodstock 3. “Far out” indeed. Or, “meh.” Those were the two reactions at the polar ends of the eclipse on my block. So Big Ben goes into the shop for a tune-up. So what? But you have, in your post/poem, explained, using the explanatory device of poetry, why that is significant. By “point of view is everything” I might have suggested that to find oneself in the zone of totality is random. How does one explain the center of totality experience to someone who has not experienced it? That just might be the purpose of poetry. But everyone (almost literally, here) was reading the eclipse (thru safety approved glasses of course), but I’m not sure how many were reading poems. In any case, I wanted to share that for us here on the block the most impressive moment of the eclipse (we were at 99. something totality) was how quiet the street became, not dark, but a double twilight, the cats and birds quiet, evening at morning. Scads of eclipse glasses are now headed to the dumps. Where are the safety glasses with which we might view poems?
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graphic picture from 1871, and words from 2017 .. the silencing of Big Ben on the same day did not pass me by but no-one else seemed to notice. Thank you for the high and low light Phi …
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What an expansive view of the eclipse. The phenomena of science imbued with epic, timeless meaning. Wonderful, Philippa.
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Thanks Diana. I wanted to capture the magic ignored by earthly trivia. Today I wrote a comment asking if it had struck ( word deliberate)anyone that on the day the moon silenced the sun the chimes of Big Ben were silenced too. (Perhaps the US has not featured this small event of the clock that chimed throughout the war has to be gagged for reasons of health and safety while workman repair the tower! Oh tempora, O mores!) I found this synchronicity of two forms of time (Chronos) deeply significant.
The only answer it elicited was ‘Are you high?!
That merely confirmed the point I was making! Depressing all the same.
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That news of the silencing of Big Ben did make news here. Yes, it seems eerily synchronous.
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Thanks both for a virtual tipple!
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Point of view is everything.
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Love your spacious vision.
In spontaneous response …
the scale of a tear
moon’s shadow blots out the sun
round things – apples here
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