Day 649

The child was born healthy
three years ago, chubby baby
nursed by her mother. Her mother, too,
healthy. Strong. Vibrant. Now
they live in a makeshift tent
whose sides have been battered
by rain, unrelenting heat. Now her mother
has lost four older children. Now her father
has been gone for a year, missing
somewhere under the rubble. Now the child weighs 
what she weighed at thirteen months, her legs so thin and weak
she can barely walk.  Her mother picks her up
when she cries at night
and is stunned each time
by her lightness. Her near
Inexistence. It seems,
as the days go by without food or respite,
that her child is becoming a petal,
the wing of a moth, a scrap of paper
blown by the wind.

Day 648

From a photograph

 
A mother is sitting
with her two daughters. One 
is maybe six or seven months,
The other probably two. All three 
are dressed in fancy clothing.
The children in little flowered dresses,
the mother elegant: 
her head scarf possibly silk, her long dress
falling in silken cascades to the floor.
They are sitting on some kind
of hooplike swing. It’s wound
with flowers, branches of lilac, wisteria.
Was this photograph taken
before the genocide began? Was it
taken since? Maybe months ago, in spring? 
There’s no way to know.
Nor do we know
what they were celebrating. A birthday? A wedding?  
What we know is that
they are gone. All three of them,
gone. Gone in a bombing? Shot dead
by snipers?  What we know is that
these daughters will not grow, will not
wear any more flowered dresses, 
will not celebrate anyone’s birthday. 
What we know
is that their mother, proudly 
holding their hands, has gone down
with them into death. Will not
touch their small bodies again,
nor sit with them again on any swing.
What we know is that they have gone, all three, 
despite what must have been
their happiness that day — 
beyond their fear. Beyond their joy.

Day 647

The children are lining up
with their parents
to get water. July. Nuseirat.
It’s hot, they’re thirsty, the water
they have is contaminated. The children
are standing in line
in their sundresses, their cotton shorts.
They’re too hot and thirsty to talk,
but one of them pushes another
whimsically, just a little, and suddenly
they’re playing, laughing.
Then the shots come. Then
the child who pushed
is lying on the ground.
Then he is bleeding out
through his nose, his mouth, his ears.
Then his mother is kneeling
beside him, shouting his name,
shouting for help. Then a man
who had just managed 
to fill his bucket with water
pours all the water 
tenderly onto the child
to wash away the blood.
To cool him as he dies.

Day 646

Doctors Against Genocide
Al Shifa

They are rebuilding the bombed
hospital:  the destroyed
machinery, the wrecked ER.
They are building a field hospital
on its grounds:  tents
for examining rooms, tents
for patients who need to stay,
tents for staff.  A surgery tent.
They’re collecting instruments,
iv lines.  They’re repairing
damaged beds, damaged wheelchairs.
They know their field hospital
could be bombed again.  They know
there are those who tell them
it’s futile, impossible, doomed.
Why set up these tents
with walkways between them?
Why set down benches for weary
nurses and doctors? Visitors?  Why
plant these trees?  The doctor
who tells you about this
nods.  Smiles. He’ll return
to the market for nylon.  Canvas.
That what they rebuild
may be useful.  Durable.
That the sturdiness they’ve grown
for years be sufficient
to serve them.  Thay they never
accept defeat.  That they not be defeated.

Day 645

They lie, dead, next to each other
on the linoleum floor
of the clinic, a boy and a girl
maybe two years old? Three?
Were they twins?  Siblings?
Cousins? Did they know one another
at all?  Someone that morning
dressed the boy in jeans, a green
t-shirt.  The girl in white lacy panties,
a flowered dress.  Someone
tied her pink shoes, someone
helped the boy
with the metal button
of his jeans.  All
stained with blood
now, drying blood.
Were they playing together
when the bomb struck?  Near them
a woman bends over the body
of an older boy, lying still, his eyes
half open.  Is he alive?  Is she
pleading desperately
for someone to save 
him?  Is she the mother
of all three of them
and the boy sitting a little apart,
his body seemingly whole,
a blank, startled look
on his dirt-splattered face?

Day 644

The school they were sheltering in
has gone up in flames.  Tell me,
who could escape it?  Not
the pregnant mother
with her toddler son.  Not
the father who’d already buried
his wife and five children, every
loss slowing his steps.  Not
the elderly poet, the builder
whose legs had been rendered
useless, the friends
who wrapped their arms
tenderly around each other's
waists and waited, waited.  Lay
waiting together as flames
raced toward them.  Who
could escape the roar, the pulsing,
the screams?  The horrified eyes?
School that had held children’s
singing, now a ruined
cradle.  Crucible.  Urn.

Day 643

from a photograph

The child sits on the floor
in a bare room.  Her right thigh
is bandaged.  From an earlier
wound?  From today?  No one,
for now, seems to be with her.
She stares blankly
at the photographer.  She has been
at a clinic.  She’d gone there
with her mother.  She’d gone
because one of them — both
of them? — needed help;
and what happened instead
was a bombing.  Ten children
martyred.  She had been talking
with some of them while
they were waiting.  She’d
been standing so close.
No one noticed
the planes approaching, no one
heard them until it was
too late.  The girl
she’s been talking to
lay dead on the ground.
The boys who had gathered
around them were also dead,
three of them.  She sits
on the tile floor, trying
to make herself remember
what their names were,
where they said they were from.

Day 642

They are laying the bodies of children
side by side in the road.  A line
of children stretching
farther than you can weep, from one
grief to another, one story
to another, one set of crayons,
one song, one grandmother’s
wailing, one purple t-shirt
with bunnies printed on it
to the last.  One canvas shoe.  One
headless doll, two toddlers
without heads.  They
are laying the bodies of children
side by side on the hard
ground because there’s no
place to bury them.  As though
they were wooden blocks, a 
footpath, slats of a bridge.
Where will it lead, this bridge
of halted lives?  Who
will cross over it?

Day 641

For Manal Miqdad


A post to my friends
Who have books I loaned you:
If I should die, keep them. They’re yours.
A post to my cousin: if nothing happens
To my library, it’s yours.

Poet, mother of three,
you ask yourself in your journal
why, with bombs falling
not far from you, you’re thinking
about your books. All the books
you lost in the last siege, then replaced.
All the books you’ve loved, learned from,
read passages from to your friends,
your children. How, you ask yourself,
will you carry them when you flee?
How many will you be able to hold?
How much will they slow you down?
Will your children take some of them?
They’ll be carrying their own things.
Why are you thinking so desperately
about your books? Why books?
All this you’re asking yourself
as bombs fall on your city.
You remember hours reading, studying.
How they shaped your life, these books.
The past, you write — “once
Upon a time”— is now a cemetery.

Day 640

Where has the time gone,
your sister asks you. It’s late.
You’re lying side by side
in the tent. The night wind
blows sand against the canvas flaps.
Your small brothers sleep restlessly,
crying out now and then. In hunger?
Fear? The summer night is warm.
The air the tent still holds
clings to your body, even soothing.
Where has it gone? she asks again.
We were young and now it feels
our youth has been drained from us.
We laughed. We danced. Now our days
are spent looking for water. Rationing
food. You hear her beneath the sound
of explosions not far away. You want
to answer her but you can’t
find the words. Sleep overcomes
you. A shroud. Almost comforting.