Challenging Poetry

overshadowed

pictures don't do it justice,
say my sister and nephew
as they try to describe totality,

it's a perfect circle of black
surrounded by rays like
a child's drawing—it's like a black
hole, he says—the sky gets dark,
deepest blue, around the corona
and we saw Venus,
but the horizon is like a sunset—

full of fiery color? I ask,
but she just shakes her head.
—the best four minutes and two seconds
of my life, he says, and repeats it
with a child's certainty—I
don't have words, she says,

as I find this poem
through the shadowed wonder
in their eyes.

April 11—Eclipse/d