#Kamilah Aisha Moon

[abellinthecupboard]

Mercy Beach

Stony trails of jagged beauty rise like stretch marks streaking sand-hips. All the Earth has borne beguiles us & battered bodies build our acres. Babes that sleep in hewn rock cradles learn to bear the hardness coming. Tough grace forged in tender bones— may this serve & bless them well. They grow & break grief into islands of sun-baked stone submerged in salt kisses, worn down by the ocean’s ardor relentless as any strong loving. May they find caresses that abolish pain. Like Earth, they brandish wounds of gold!

— Kamilah Aisha Moon

[litbowl]

Image via Poetry Foundation. Poem originally published in Kamilah Aisha Moon's book, She Has a Name. (Four Way Books).

[cpmhew]

the trudge of faith every body afire knows

[violettesiren]

I.

Their noises make you think they are crying or suffering. They have learned to bow. Even the fawns bow, centuries of bowing in their blood.

They are not considered wild. Precious pests litter parks with dung, take over the roads. Sweet nuisance worth saving, thinning these herds is a last resort—once a capital offense to spill their endangered blood.

They are so used to humans, it is scary.

II.

Our cries are heard as noise, our suffering considered natural. Native citizens, we are not free to roam or deemed sacred like Japanese bowing deer protected as messengers of the gods.

Nara, Japan is known for its temples, shrines to peace. America is known for its churches, segregated Sundays.

This is not Nara, Japan. Hunted, it is always open season. The sight of dark skin brings out the wild in certain human breeds. Bowing, hands up or any other gesture of surrender makes no difference.

They slay our young & leave them in the streets, expect us to walk away & wonder, after centuries why we are not used to this—

grieving masses treated like waste, filthy herds thinned at will.

III.

To be clear, this is America & we are not deer We are not deer We are not dear here

The Emperor’s Deer by Kamilah Aisha Moon

[meidui]

Margartia Karapanou, Rien ne va plus (translated by Karen Emmerich) • Jackson Holbert, Moth after Chessy Normile • LL, Venus | Unsent letter • Kamilah Aisha Moon, 1st Vote • Chana Bloch, THE RULE OF GRAMMAR • Fleurie, Love and War • Warsan Shire • Margaret Schnabel, Untitled

[april-is]

April 25, 2024: from Moon for Aisha, Aracelis Girmay

from Moon for Aisha Aracelis Girmay

— for Kamilah Aisha Moon, with a line after Cornelius Eady’s ''Gratitude''

Dear Aisha, I mean to be writing you a birthday letter, though it’s not September, the winter already nearing, the bareness of trees, their weightlessness, their gestures — grace or grief. The windows of buildings all shining early, lit with light, & I am only ten & riding all of my horses home, still sisterless, wanting sisters.

You do not know me yet. In fact, we are years away from that life. But I am thankful for some inexplicable thing, let’s call it “freedom,” or “night,” the terror & glee of being outside late, after dark, my mother’s voice shouting for me beneath stars which, I learned in school, are suddenly not so different from the small salt of fathers, & gratitude for that, & for the red house of your mother’s blood, & then, you, all nearly grown, all long-legged laughter, already knowing all the songs & all the dances, not my friend, yet, but, somehow — Out There.

In one version of our lives, it is November. Through a window I see one of our elders is a black eye of a woman, is a thinker, & magnificent. [...] It is always her birthday. She has always lived to tell a part of the story of the world, what happened here.

If not a moon, what can we bring this woman who walks ahead? For whom you were named, & whose name has been added to by you whose language crowns the dark field of what has been hushed, of what is beautiful & black, & blue.

--

Read the full poem here.

Written to the author's friend, poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who died in 2021. Read one of her essays: It's Not The Load That Breaks You Down; It's The Way You Carry It.

More on friendship: + Ode to Friendship, Noor Hindi + from how many of us have them?, Danez Smith

Today in:

2023: Still Life with Nursing Bra, Keetje Kuipers 2022: A Small-Sized Mystery, Jane Hirshfield 2021: Prayer for My Unborn Niece or Nephew, Ross Gay 2020: Vigil, Phillis Levin 2019: Nights in the Neighborhood, Linda Gregg 2018: I Dreamed Again, Anne Michaels 2017: wishes for sons, Lucille Clifton 2016: Told You So, Keetje Kuipers 2015: Accident, Mass. Ave., Jill McDonough 2014: This Hour and What Is Dead, Li-Young Lee 2013: To Myself, Franz Wright 2012: Manet’s Olympia, Margaret Atwood 2011: Three Rivers, Alpay Ulku 2010: Ode to Hangover, Dean Young 2009: We become new, Marge Piercy 2008: The Only Animal, Franz Wright 2007: Dream Song 385, John Berryman 2006: The Quiet World, Jeffrey McDaniel 2005: Man and Wife, Robert Lowell

[ztxtz]

To a Dear Friend Mothering Misery Kamilah Aisha Moon

Every time your grief cries, you pick it up, cradle it like a newborn. But your pain isn't precious, not your life-long responsibility. For each doting moment,

your soul refuses to sing for days -- and the world needs your music too much.

Please leave it be; no more milk. Let it cry for nights on end unattended. Let it forget how your heartbeat sounds, the warmth of your skin. Stop making it soup when it coughs, setting a place for it at the table or buying it new clothes. Convert its old room into a sanctuary for things you adore. Let your ache become self-sufficient and grow apart from you,

walk out the door and forget to call home.

to a dear friend mothering misery by kamilah aisha moon

[seekingstars]

Love - Kamilah Aisha Moon

[lifeinpoetry]

Candlelight for two is a date; I faintly remember those. Candlelight alone is a séance— forgive me, my dearly departed for crying out so often, for still needing you so damn much.

— Kamilah Aisha Moon, from “Storm,” Together in a Sudden Strangeness, ed. Alice Quinn

[wintryblight]

Hi! First of all, thank you so much for this blog! I can't imagine all the work involved in finding all these poems. You are a sweetheart!

I would like to ask if you can recommend poems about space, stars or galaxies. Anything space related will do!

Again, thank you so much for this blog. Hope everything is ok with you and your family. Don't forget to take care of yourself!

hi! thank you so much for your kind words. you are a sweetheart as well & thank you so much for supporting my project. enjoy reading & take care! here is a previous compilation i made on the moon as well that i think you’d love.

Keith S. Wilson, “Heliocentric” | Who could love you / like this? Who else will sew you in the stars?

Ada Limón, “Dead Stars” | We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus, / Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx. / But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too

Tracy K. Smith, “My God, It’s Full of Stars” | Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last, / Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on / At twilight.

Natalie Diaz, “How the Milky Way Was Made” | You see them now— / god-large, gold-green sides, / moon-white belly and breast— / making their great speeded way across the darkest hours, / rippling the sapphired sky-water into a galaxy road.

Dorianne Laux, “Third Rock from the Sun” | when the leaves were turning colors in their dying / and we didn’t know why, or that they would return, / bud and green. One of a billion / small miracles.

Kamilah Aisha Moon, “Exploded Stars” | we remember / the most massive / flares among us, / detonate inside / each other to hold / tiny supernovae / in our arms

[bibliomancyoracle]

“Want” is no longer your enemy.

*

from “IRONY” by KAMILAH AISHA MOON

[lunchboxpoems]

THE EMPEROR’S DEER

I. Their noises make you think they are crying or suffering. They have learned to bow. Even the fawns bow, centuries of bowing in their blood. They are not considered wild. Precious pests litter parks with dung, take over the roads. Sweet nuisance worth saving, thinning these herds is a last resort — once a capital offense to spill their endangered blood. They are so used to humans, it is scary. II. Our cries are heard as noise, our suffering considered natural. Native citizens, we are not free to roam or deemed sacred like Japanese bowing deer protected as messengers of the gods. Nara, Japan is known for its temples, shrines to peace. America is known for its churches, segregated Sundays. This is not Nara, Japan. Hunted, it is always open season. The sight of dark skin brings out the wild in certain human breeds. Bowing, hands up or any other gesture of surrender makes no difference. They slay our young & leave them in the streets, expect us to walk away & wonder, after centuries why we are not used to this — grieving masses treated like waste, filthy herds thinned at will. III. To be clear, this is America & we are not deer We are not deer We are not dear here

KAMILAH AISHA MOON

[theinwardlight]

Kamilah Aisha Moon, “Love”

[alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry]

I have all of these lily plants but not you, nor peace.

How they ease my breathing yet trouble my mind, symbols of your soaring too high to see or reach, beauty clanging like bells out of tune, time’s up.         Leaves

so shiny & perfect they look fake, but a few brown ones barely clinging & curled in on themselves— less supple, less everything like me, let me know they are real.

They are real. Too real. Lord knows you were the most real one can ever be & now you are really gone!

Your need is over, but your giving goes on & on.     Heaven is shedding desire’s heavy robes, pure devotion to love’s bare essence.    You, flowered & shiny in what’s left of my heart, teaching me to rally. No matter how it may appear, I’m not rootless.

Today & tomorrow & the day after that, you remain evergreen & ours somewhere not here, as my tears land in potted soil exiled from its mother, Earth, like me.

Disbelief ~ Kamilah Aisha Moon

[violettesiren]

— for Kamilah Aisha Moon, with a line after Cornelius Eady’s ''Gratitude''

Dear Aisha, I mean to be writing you a birthday letter, though it’s not September, the winter already nearing, the bareness of trees, their weightlessness, their gestures — grace or grief. The windows of buildings all shining early, lit with light, & I am only ten & riding all of my horses home, still sisterless, wanting sisters.

You do not know me yet. In fact, we are years away from that life. But I am thankful for some inexplicable thing, let’s call it “freedom,” or “night,” the terror & glee of being outside late, after dark, my mother’s voice shouting for me beneath stars which, I learned in school, are suddenly not so different from the small salt of fathers, & gratitude for that, & for the red house of your mother’s blood, & then, you, all nearly grown, all long-legged laughter, already knowing all the songs & all the dances, not my friend, yet, but, somehow — Out There.

In one version of our lives, it is November. Through a window I see one of our elders is a black eye of a woman, is a thinker, & magnificent. At a desk, she builds her house with her hands, with paper, wood & clay, the years of light & the years of dark. She sees oblivion & turns, crowns her head, instead, with flowers, the upper & the lower worlds. Lightning streaks the black mind of her hair, she leaves it there, then cleans the house with laughter, dances broadly in each room, a pirouette, a wop. Out of doors, she dares to wear the house key from a silver hoop recalling the moon, the gleaming syllable: of a planet dark with fires & time. She is glorious, isn’t she? It is always her birthday. She has always lived to tell a part of the story of the world, what happened here.

If not a moon, what can we bring this woman who walks ahead? For whom you were named, & whose name has been added to by you whose language crowns the dark field of what has been hushed, of what is beautiful & black, & blue.

Moon for Aisha by Aracelis Girmay

[elizabethanism]

They are left to imagine

what her life might have been.

We are left to imagine the day

it won't require imagination

to care about all of the others.

—Kamilah Aisha Moon