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      September 2, 2024Ghazal: Of PrayerChiwenite Onyekwelu

      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 #84 – 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.”

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