The Battle of the Eclipse
by Amber Adams
“There is no suicide in our time / unrelated to history” —Denise Levertov
Just imagine: light fading from spears
and desert pinnacles, Lydian & Median warriors
looking to the sky to see their downfall foretold.
Currents of shadow bands fanned
the battlefield as the moon bit through
the sun, a sudden disappearance of day. The war stopped
as three celestial bodies, an ellipsis,
came into perfect alignment. I dream
of all wars that didn’t lead to your suicide.
What does it take? What doesn’t it take?
There in the sky, your unfinished
life hangs in the cerement clouds.
I keep coming back to it: the way your mind
turned on itself—became war itself—after endless,
elliptical rotations
between here and Iraq. Inevitable
deployments, inevitable danger, inevitable
heat, inedible MREs, incomings,
invasion of phosphorus dreams, insomniac. A fugue
state let slip your own birthright, a boy
looking up at the sky with a pinhole
camera made of cardboard and aluminum foil. Awe
is something so easy to create that we forget.
Any eclipse is worth stopping for…
any suicide is an eclipse.
Amber Adams is a poet and counselor living in Boulder, Colorado. She received her MA in Literary Studies from the University of Denver, and her MA in Counseling from Regis University. Her work has appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Narrative, War Literature and the Arts Journal, Stone Canoe Journal, and elsewhere. She served in the United States Army Reserves and completed one tour of duty under Operation Iraqi Freedom.