Seeing the Eclipse in Maine

It started about noon. On top of Mount Batte,

We were all exclaiming. Someone had a cardboard

And a pin, and we all cried out when the sun

Appeared in tiny form on the notebook cover.

It was hard to believe. The high school teacher

We’d met called it a pinhole camera,

People in the Renaissance loved to do that.

And when the moon had passed partly through

We saw on a rock underneath a fir tree,

Dozens of crescents—made the same way—

Thousands! Even our straw hats produced

A few as we moved them over the bare granite.

We shared chocolate, and one man from Maine

Told a joke. Suns were everywhere—at our feet.

Copyright Credit: Poem copyright © 1997 by Robert Bly, whose most recent book of poetry is My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, Harper Perennial, 2006. Poem reprinted from Music, Pictures, and Stories, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 2002, by permission of the writer.

Source: 1997