GHAZAL: OF PRAYER
While her organs wrecked, she had a mouth full
of prayer.
It was stage IV & I didn’t understand the logic.
How, of prayer,
Of the softness between God’s hands, cancer
could slip in unnoticed.
Like the Diocletian Persecutors, burning books
of prayer.
You have to keep your body open: The first
rule of prayer
is also the last. I saw her begin chemotherapy.
An act of prayer
Or maybe strength. As the persecutors burned
books of prayer,
historians say, they burnt the believers as well.
To deprive of prayer
Is to walk headfirst into light, to walk until you
become your own
jeweled God. It was Saddiq Dzukogi who—
in a dirge of prayer—
Wrote, Questions lead you out of blasphemy
not into it.
O cherub of metastasizing cells. Patron Saint
of prayer
Rams. Did you listen as she grappled her beads
of prayer,
or did you panic—a celestial retreating at the
latch of prayer.
It infected one lymph node & then the next. Each
spread as exact.
Until she moved from grief to glitter, from groan
to humming songs of prayer.
Death draws you towards surrender or away from it.
Sleek mouth of prayer,
of humor & those bedside jokes. As if she knew her
days of prayer
Were ending, & she held on to what was left after all.
Made a mockery of her pain
knowing she’d never hurt again. As if to say, I’m out
I’m out, I’m out of prayer.
—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024
Tribute to the Ghazal
__________
Chiwenite Onyekwelu: “I always loved reading ghazals, even though I had never written one. I loved that, somehow, ghazal poems seem to point the reader towards a particular word or words—thereby willing them to pay attention and remain in the present. This poem is my first-ever ghazal. I wrote it after one of my clinical rounds in the cancer ward as a pharmacy undergraduate. I saw a woman push back pain and fear and death, and when I came home, I knew I had to write this poem.” (web)
