SOLAR ECLIPSES AND SARM (3)
By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe
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A solar eclipse is truly fine
Only on the totality line.
(Andrei Dorian Gheorghe)
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For this episode I have extracted a series of texts created by personalities, which were presented at the international cosmopoetry festival of the cultural-astronomical event EuRoEclipse Perseids 1999 of the Romanian Society for Meteors and Astronomy (SARM):
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Eclipse:
End or Beginning?
Darkness or Light?
Will the Light be victorious
inside us?
Will the Light drive away
the darkness which overruns the world?
(Valentin Grigore, Romania, president of SARM)
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(STONEHENGE PREDISCTS ITS FIRST ECLIPSE)
sky-eye blinks, dark-in-
day stills skylark, tribe wails guilt -
priest pats stone: “Well done”.
(Steve Sneyd, UK, director of Hilltop Press)
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I began in astronomy many years ago.
I enjoyed travelling around the world to see eclipses.
And everyone said:
"You see one.
Why do you go to see another?"
And I replied:
“If you see a pretty girl,
you never want to see another?”
(Roger Tuthill, USA, famous eclipse hunter)
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(PERSEID-TIME SOLAR ECLIPSE, AUGUST 11, 1999)
As the eclipsed Sun rests on the Lion’s forepaws,
and Venus stands guard below the Lion’s Heart,
we will briefly see both the Eclipse Dragon
and the Hydra-Dragon’s Head.
Will it take the gleam of a Perseid meteor
from dragon-slaying Perseus’ Sword Handle
to scare both dragons from the sky
and let the Sun blaze forth again,
as it should on an August mid-morning?
(Alastair McBeath, UK, vice-president of the International Meteor Organization)
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My friend, I don't think you know.
Sometimes the Sun is not
just an incident in the solar system.
I pity them - those from
the parallel worlds,
where the eclipse could be inexistent.
You know, sometimes I think:
perhaps it was a dream,
or we are the dream
of the Moon.
(Dan Mitrut, Romania, vice-president of SARM)
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When you see an eclipse
you are out of time,
something happens, you are not in reality,
the light around you is like you never saw it before,
it's difficult to see it the same after,
it is a unique moment,
you cannot appreciate how long the eclipse is...
is it the part of a second?
you are not able to tell,
you are in something magic...
You know,
after the eclipse
something is gone...
(Eric Boineau, France, president of Astroclub Le Sablier)
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If you want to see more about those times, you can watch the 2005 web project The Best of SARM (it is strongly recommended to be accessed on a laptop, not by phone):
http://www.cosmopoetry.ro/tbos/
#poetry