Watching the Eclipse

Well it would scald our eyes -
so we hide behind shades
or replications in grimy puddles
or camera screens
and then we don’t really see
the moon creeping over the cold nothing
between us and the stars, 
scaled beyond belief or existence 

and silent

So we make a small trivial hole in a card
as a lens to capture a tiny scene
on another card
and see an illusion 
of how, only for a short time,
nothing stands between us and the nearest star
except this black round rock
which we, the only people, have visited. 
Can we believe this? Even as with drawn breath
we pause and tick off a few more moments
of our place in this time.

But the birds, our sparrows, lacking a head-clock,
that says the day was short, and that this is not the night,
go silent as space. 
Do they know that they have missed an eye-blink.
Do they tick away seconds of their shorter time.
Do they count this. Do they know time.
Are they so easily deceived.
Can they be - what do birds Know?

But We worry at our single cloudy thoughts
of parsecs and light-years and megaspace -
space without atoms, 
reaching through the unknown,
to a blank ‘Out There’, 
where silence does not think
where light alone passes –

 and even the light is lonely.