Sun has many eyes, black against its blinding face;
Those are counterpoint to what the night reveals from space.
No living thing returns the gaze and yet our senses moth
Towards the creation candle as we rise from soil bedcloth.
Moon is bearer of Sun’s brazier against Sun’s numerous tribe,
Burning its own spider web that constellations describe.
The monthly blaze has built up enough charcoal to this day
Fuel a blackout of the nuclear core along its watchful way,
Whereas Moon dons Sun’s skirt and trails its skyweb over soil
To trap each moth-like thing, and upward with their senses, all aboil.
Read More:
The Total Solar Eclipse We Deserve [The New Yorker]
Uche Ogbuji, more properly Úchèńnà Ogbújí, was born in Calabar, Nigeria. He lived in Egypt, England and elsewhere before settling near Boulder, Colorado. A computer engineer and entrepreneur by trade, his poetry chapbook, Ndewo, Colorado (Aldrich Press) is a Colorado Book Award Winner, and a Westword Award Winner (“Best Environmental Poetry”). His poems, published worldwide, fuse Igbo culture, European classicism, American Mountain West setting, and Hip-Hop. He co-hosts the Poetry Voice podcast, featured in the Best New African Poets anthology, and was shortlisted for Nigeria’s Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize.
