Moon’s Testimony

🌒 Author’s Note

In Aztec myth, Coyolxauhqui was slain by her brother, the sun god Huitzilopochtli, and her dismembered body became the moon. This letter gives her voice back—part daughter, part mother, part divine rebellion—where broken light becomes its own holiness.

🌒The Poem

I remember the sound

before the silence—

how the air split open

with my name.

They called it prophecy,

but it was hunger.

They called it justice,

but it was fear.

My brother rose

from our mother’s womb

clothed in flame,

sword humming with light—

the son already burning hot,

like father, like sun.

And I—

I was still gathering

the scattered pieces of my heart,

reclaiming parts stolen long ago.

They say he saved her from me,

that he slew me to protect her,

but I know what truth tastes like:

iron and dust,

a prayer half-swallowed

by the ones who carve history in stone.

I was the drum

that summoned an army of stars,

the face that launched revolutions,

the heartbeat of the world

held in the palm

of a trembling hand.

I was the mirror

before they broke it—

shattered into prisms of distortion,

each shard still shining

pure white light.

Every bell on my cheek

rang with a feminine power

they mistook for threat.

Mankind could not bear the weight

of a woman who was both

maiden and mother—

creation and undoing

in the same breath.

So they cast my head into the heavens,

scattered my limbs

like seeds on fallow ground

in the righteous name

of a mother’s love.

Yet from the soil of my body

constellations grew.

My ribs became rivers.

My spine curved

into the arc of return.

I learned what it means

to be torn apart—

fractured into fractals,

still bright enough

to command the tide.

Even the sea

cannot resist my pull.

Proof that when light shatters,

its reflections become holy.

So when you look up at me now,

know this:

I am not a wound.

I am the map they feared you’d follow—

the mother’s mourning,

the daughter’s defiance,

the face that will not fade.

Call me goddess.

Call me apparition.

Call me the one

who refused to disappear.

I am the moon—

I could not stop shining

even after I was broken

into a million points of light

across the span of time itself.

I was never meant to fall—

I was meant to rise,

gathering what was stolen,

turning ruin into light.