57 Shannon Brooks – To Marry the Sun

Shannon Brooks (she/her/hers) is a senior majoring in English with a focus on creative writing. Her hometown is Greenfield, Indiana.  This poem was written for an assignment for W303 Writing Poetry in the fall of 2023.  Her inspiration for this poem was the 2017 solar eclipse.  Below is a one-minute video of her reading her poem “To Marry the Sun” with a short introduction.  Professor Brian Brodeur notes, “In her astonishing poems, Shannon Brooks displays an uncommonly good ear, writing deft metrical verse that seems to happen for her as naturally as breathing. In this sense, Shannon’s poems are startlingly inspired, a word that comes from the Latin ‘inspirare’ (to breathe or blow into).”

To Marry the Sun

The moon was on the path between the sun

and earth, from where so many of us gazed.

A sheath of midnight shadow-play engulfed

the forest edge, a near-total eclipse.

The altered atmosphere deceived my senses

as the sun at noon diminished into twilight,

sending diurnal creatures to their dens.

I wavered as if sick with vertigo.

The air, unearthly in penumbral light,

cooled, like another realm had been uncloaked.

The all-but-covered sun revealed to us

a diamond ring, a cosmic flare of fire,

bespoke within the hills of Tennessee.