The Day the Sun Began to Shrink
I remember it well
The day that the sun began to shrink
It was a spring day
Late April
When the last of the winter’s bite
Had finally been shaken off
And the sun
Full and boundless in the sky
Hung above our heads
As if nothing was amiss
Its light and its
Heat radiated with middle-aged confidence
From its perch
It had seen much
It had seen all
Of ourselves
And our world
Amun Ra
Hyperion and his beloved boy
Helios on his golden chariot
Sol Invictus
In all of us
Doumu
Aine
Who brought wealth as well as light
Horus’s right eye
Watching us
Approvingly?
Disapprovingly?
Both?
Or maybe neither —
Maybe the eye was turned elsewhere
On the affairs of another kind
In another place
Regardless
We watched it
Carefully
Lest we blind
Or burn ourselves in its radiance
The night of the day the sun
Began its shrinking
I sensed something was off
Not my thinking part
But my feeling part
Later
In the dark world that was to follow
I would discover that others had the same sense
The sense that something was wrong
Up there
In that fiery nuclear pellet that dwelled
Between our would and the heavens
The next morning came
As it always had
The same
And yet different
In texture and substance
Everyone felt it
Something had changed
In the yellow and orange melt that sliced
The dark sky open and forced the day
upon the night
The people
Went about their days
With an uneasy feeling in their guts
And a newly arrived heaviness in their hearts
Few spoke of this
As none could explain its fons
Et origo
But as heads turned cautiously upwards
Catching quick glances at the sky
The sensation that something was off
Was preeminent and abound
Many across the world didn’t sleep that night
They stayed up
Following the events on the other side
The sunny side
And waited for the worm to turn
And to find out what dawn would birth
Dawn brought less of itself
Than ever before
And hearts sank into deep places
And again the next day
And the next
For more than a week
Before satellites turned their great mechanical eyes
Sunwards
And confirmed that
Which everyone already knew
The sun was shrinking
Little by little
Moment by passing moment
Billons of square feet were dripping off
The live-giving ball every second
Disappearing into the blackness around it
And never returning
Its signature was shrinking
On every human device
That could read radiation
It was dying
Its corona fading
And we could not look directly into its dying eyes
And ask it
Why? Why are you leaving us?
Why now? What have we done?
What can we do?
Weeks
Turned to months
And the seasons ceased to mean
Anything they had meant
The brave tried to develop new seasons
New meaning
But they were mocked
Hated
Their names turned to spit
And they were fools anyway
Every change they made
Was made irrelevant
By the ever-shrinking sun above
A ship went up
Hastily built
Then two more
And then two more
None returned
From their mysterious voyages
Their esoteric nature was kept a secret
None knew if they went towards the sun
A fix in mind and body
Or away from it
A surrender
A fleeing
A search for a new parent star
Exactly one year
After the sun began to shrink
Only half of what once was
Still was
One could now peer through squinting eyes
Directly into the thing
Without fear of blindness
Or burn
Life was lived at night
What remained of the day
Had become too mournful
For what remained of the people
I am old enough to remember
The sun
The full sun
Not the thin sliver
Of maudlin light
That tortures us with its
Unnatural prescence
For ten minutes of the day
Not that time means what
It once did
I recall what it was
What it once was
The handful born after that day
Won’t believe us
Cant
Out photographs are
Forgery’s
Besides
It doesn’t matter
Soon there will be no one
Left to tell our stories
Or to listen to them
The Eye of Horus
Is blinking
Its final blink
And I am sleeping
My final sleep