To Théma, Almost Two Years after Your Burial
- To Théma, Almost Two Years after Your Burial
I don’t know their names & they don’t know yours, though your flesh is now of their flesh as a donor.
I try not to get angry at strangers pressing too close, choosing kindness just in case there’s a part of you brushing by. What have your gorgeous, castaway eyes gifted another to see? I must have dined near what remains of you, faithful organ thriving in a body spending your hours, strolling past milestones you won’t reach. Your children
play around us, your laugh inside tiny throats, holding their bodies the way you held yours against fading light, letting music enter & move them alive. Alive! Your name sweet pepper burning your parents’ tongues, the spice of you fresh as the day they brought you home.
In lieu of flowers, this. Oh cousin, you know the deepest sacrifice— being a miracle is far from the glory of receiving one. No longer blessed, you live on as blessing. [End Page 132]
Kamilah Aisha Moon is the author of She Has a Name (2013). A Pushcart Prize winner and a 2015 New American Poet, she has received fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Hedgebrook. Featured in Harvard Review, Poem-A Day, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere, her next collection, Starshine & Clay, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2017.
