Shadowed Sun Sonnets

1. Description of a Shadowed Sun

People don’t like to be told
An occultation’s coming.
Daily, seasonal changes
Offer enough slips and shifts.

A darkening perspective
Is grim, pathological,
And generally no fun.

But my point of view is just
A pinhole poked for viewing
That total eclipse.

It darkens my world
Considerably,
But it makes it possible
To stare at the shadowed sun.


2. Wonder Chambers

“The hodge-podgery
Of it all—diversity,
Miscellany, plenitude—

The aim is to overwhelm.”
The world is a museum
Of a manifold fullness

From which we distill
The most wondrous and bizarre,
Trying to repeat the world,

But also to make it small.
If we can touch the extremes
And gather them in a room,

We can call ourselves bespoke.
“Nature is allowed to joke.”


3. Teaming

Cooperation
And competition
Are not exclusive options.

Cooperation inflames
Competition, scales it up.
Cooperation

Gathers competition, as
Oxygen lets cells amass
Multicellularity,

Burns fuel that pushes them through
Scale’s escape velocity.
Cooperation transcends

Competition as blue whales 
Transcend krill and krill plankton.


4. Rigor Combined with Ghoulishness

“Strike! It is allowed us!”

History suggests,

Among any group

Of humans given

Power and permission 

To attack and kill

Other humans as they wish,

Many of them will.

Never forget we are beasts

Within beasts within a beast.

The words we think we are, are

Only the late arrivals,

The inner wings of outer

Beast roaming free of the rest,

Ghoulish, rigorous, repressed.


5. Knowing More Won’t Help You Now

People don’t really
Control anything,
But superstition

Haunts us when we really know
We’re in the realm of something
Over which we’ve no control.

Superstitious behaviors
Are not performed for foolish
Attempts to control

What’s beyond us, but are strong
Mnemonics, reminding us
We’re somewhere where we’re helpless.

The person who knocks on wood
Knows more knowing does no good.


6. Mysterious Tower Calligrapher

Still, I must not forget that
Writing once put these monsters
Into me, that we

Were never certain, the words
Or me, who were the dancers
And who only puppetry,

When these ideas, those monsters,
Executed our
Choreography.

We had to let the monsters
Be themselves and do their thing,
Catch our fingers in their strings,

Look past seeing words to see
Thought’s writhing calligraphy.