If a Solar System Fails, and There's No One Around to See--

By Tehnuka

When the Moon disappears, I pluck out my eye and fling it up high. People complain it’s too small, too close, and watches too carefully. I lack the depth perception to tell.

“We would’ve managed without one,” they grumble as the red-streaked globe’s russet-brown iris peers down at us. “Didn’t we do that already, every new moon night?”

We discuss whether it looks judgmental. We reassure ourselves it cannot see or reason. “Wouldn’t I have known if it had a mind of its own?” I ask.

When the Sun disappears, the Eye in the sky is left unlit—only another abandoned fragment of a solar system lost in darkness.

This last endless night, to the endless list of mourning, we add the reflected light that would have let us imagine ourselves out there, in the sky, red-streaked and round, detached and safe—the single, disembodied, witness to our end.

Tehnuka is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand who calls on all of us to use our wonderful, unique minds and/or bodies in whatever ways we can to refuse and resist the genocide of Palestinian people and the colonisation of Palestine. Resist with every breath and deed until Palestine is free—until we are all free.