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Your Own Eclipse, a poem by Mary Sexson





Your Own Eclipse


We waited for the eclipse’s darkness

together, me running in and out

with our grandson to peer

through the homemade viewer

we’d fashioned from one

of his cereal boxes.


You stayed inside, still

tending to your heart, fresh

from an eclipse of its own,

some dark moon lumbering

through your bypass grafts,

shadowing the host, and bringing us

all down to our knees.


They say we won’t see

a total eclipse for another seven years,

far enough away for me to wonder

if I’d view that one alone.

Or would you persevere, hold back

the tide that pushes closer to your shore,

even as we both ooh and aah

over the crescent shadows 

dancing on our sidewalk.




Mary Sexson is author of the award-winning book, 103 in the Light, Selected Poems 1996-2000 (Restoration Press), and co-author of Company of Women, New and Selected Poems (Chatter House Press). Her poetry has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Lion’s Den Press, Laureate, Hoosier Lit, Flying Island, New Verse News, The Indianapolis Review, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Of Rust and Glass: Scars, and Anti-Heroin Chic, among others. Finishing Line Press will publish her manuscript, Her Addiction, An Empty Place at the Table in June. Sexson’s poetry is part of the INverse Poetry Archives for Hoosier Poets. One of her poems is in the Polaris Trilogy, part of the Lunar Codex project sending poetry and other works of art to the moon. Nasa will launch this digital anthology on board as a time capsule in 2024, to reside at the Lunar South Pole.