Part of 1000 lines
by Simon Armitage, UK

Only from a plane flying well above the planet's ceiling
did the full magnitude
of the total solar eclipse of the sun live up to its billing:
dawn twice in the same day,
once from east, and once from side where the sun usually sets;
time running backwards;
the great black bird of the shadow, swooping from the west
in total silence
at twice the speed of sound; first contact; corona
Baily's Beads;
prominences; diamond rings; totality, and the general aura
a layman might reasonably expect
when one celestial body snookers another, when the sun blinks,
when the great dimmer switch
in the sky goes the whole way, and man on the moon winks
a black, lazy eye.
Some of the blessed and lucky and rich manage a snapshot,
some said a lighthouse
tricked into doing its stuff was as good as it got,
but for those on the ground
it was dark and cold and it rained. Full stop. Nevertheless
it's a theory of mine
that those who went home chilled, gloomy, wet and depressed
still got the message
loud and clear, and that what each individual felt
was a huge sense of time
and space, and subsequently a loneliness bordering on guilt
despite standing
shoulder to shoulder within the biggest human jamboree
since the year dot.
Consequently, won't all those lonely souls now feel the need
to get along,
resolve themselves to a life of having come together
whether they like it or not
or at least as a race stop mistreating each other
remorselessly from one century
to the next, if only to try and make use or sense
of what time we have left,
bearing in mind the complete absence of anything else?
It was only a thought.
Or how about this: no matter how much bluster and hype
went into the thing,
that old sun-and-moon trick sieved people into two types:
those who stayed indoors
in artificial light and buried their brains in a book,
and those who went and stood
within the clockwork of the solar system as it wheeled about
and struck.