Elegy - for a poet

An experimental ghazal by Maneo Mohale

The Second City
for Heba Abunada

We are above, building a second city,
doctors without patients or blood,
professors without overcrowding and yelling at students,
new families without pain or sadness, journalists photographing paradise,
and poets writing about eternal love, all of them from Gaza, all of them.
In heaven, a new Gaza – unbesieged – is coming into being.

—Heba Abunada, 15 October 2023, 8:47pm

skies darken along the world’s length             in one breath
what I know of the world can be said               in one breath

though the sky above me heavies itself separately
it is hitched & hemmed to others, its blue breath

double-lunged in inhale towards Al-Fashir’s sky
towards Kashmir’s sky//towards Goma//towards Gaza whose breadth

would span the distance from Braamfontein to Rosebank
if Gaza was Johannesburg—which it’s not. though one breath

holds us both in its history, as I am held in my father’s hand:
loose enough to lose. on the day of the Flood, in one breath

Heba wrote how the gunpowder turned the televisions red
in Gaza, everything changes in an instant. in one breath

a city ruptured in rubble and phosphorus the taste
of orange and the colours of cloud the scattering dust breathing

new meaning into the world. white sacks of silence
left by bloodline after bloodline robbed of breath

children have died who had not yet used their names! women & men &
those many-minded ones unworded by colonial tongue, no longer breathing

towards sunrise. the city heaves against erasure. of what use are numbers now?
everyone that I love is exhausted, everyone that I love is holding their breath

in witness as white power empties the world of magic. O Heba,
the little ones you granted refuge from empire’s red breath

the ones who changed the rockets’ course with their smiles
they are our little ones now. Baldwin said in one breath

that the children are always ours, every single one of them. in the second
city, we sing all their names. all their names. sung in one breath.

~

< Elegy - for two ancestors

< Elegy - Ipeleng Christine Moholane