Jerry Dennis

Issue 20

Eclipse Sonnet

Darkness is really coming on us now.
It is an unhealthy and unnatural
sort of dark. The brilliant light of the South
Seas, the blues and greens of the sun, are now
all as though washed down by dirty color.
Darkness is now really upon us. We
see the diamond ring, that famous circle
around the moon. We see the sun-streamers
breaking through the mountains of the moon. We
see for the first time the magnificence
of the corona extending in great
streamers away. Darkness is on us now.
It is an unnatural sort of light.
Darkness is really coming on us now.


Source & Method

Assembled almost verbatim from the transcript of a CBS radio broadcast by correspondent William Perry on location in Peru during the total solar eclipse of June 8, 1937. Transcript published in Natural History Magazine, July 1991, p. 83.

Jerry Dennis writes nonfiction books for a living (The Living Great Lakes, The Windward Shore, etc.) and enjoys composing brief works that sometimes appear in PANK, Michigan Quarterly Review, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere. (www.jerrydennis.net)


Photo by Cherry Laithang