The moon hovers high in the dawning sky,
    heedless of clocks and calendars
foretelling the impending hour    
    when her diminutive circle
will mask our proud and mighty sun.

Back in reliquaries of time,
     our fear-quaked ancestors
cowered in deepest shadow doom,
    “After our sun has died,
what will become of us"?  

Then as now, our resilient sun
     re-birthed as it will again
to warm and illumine our ways.

But shadows darker than eclipse
     remain to cloud our future,
“What will become of us
     should reason's light be doused
and forever vanish from the earth”?

*© 2017 by Robert Charles Howard