Blood Moon Ghazal
Janine Mogannam
from the RAWI conference, Bdeóta Othúŋwe/Gakaabikaang/Minneapolis, October 2023
We rise tonight under a bloody hunter’s moon,
Poets singing sorrows to a full and lusty moon.
I’ve been staring at my phone all afternoon. When I glance up,
there it is. The blood of Gaza, painting the face of a stunned moon.
Update: The cowards cut the electricity, hunt under cover of darkness. Still,
the world watches, mute.
Will you shine brighter than bombs, our handsome moon?
Update: Four thousand children dead, made ghost in bloody white shrouds.
Here, children don sheets and it is only a costume. They dance, sugar-crazed and alive, watched
by a moribund moon.
I walk to the river. Leaves of fire crunch under my feet, and I can only think of bones.
I could keep walking until I am frigid, until I’ve walked the length of Gaza. But there is a poet’s
work to be done under the moon.
We read the news, break down, repair one another. Share tea and tissues, poems and ice cream,
rage and resolution.
If I know anything, it is that Palestine is love, moon.
Our beloveds, you cannot be silenced. We become your voices. We scream
your names into the night, until our throats become bloody as the moon.
We raise our glasses and our pens, chant incantations of resistance
until under your abundant gaze liberation is won, moon.