Day 963

for Menatela Abu Libna, age 6

A little bird
from the birds of Paradise,
her grandmother called her.
Now she is dead. Dead
at six years old. Murdered
just hours ago
while playing in front
of her house. Little girl,
little bird, are you
in Paradise now
with other birds? Where,
now, will we find
your singing? Your
joyful mischievous flitting
from place to place? Who
will come to sit
on the arm
of your grandmother’s
chair and chatter
to her at the end
of day? Little bird,
little delicate fledgling,
where have you flown? Who
will know who you are? Who,
now, will take care of you?

Day 962

Sometimes you wonder
what your life would be like
now, had there not
been this genocide.
You look outside the tent
at the bare ground, ground
covered with nothing
but rubble. You remember
your house, the houses
across the road, the trees
that lined that road, abundant
with leaves. You remember
sitting in the classroom
with the professor you admired,
who was killed only months
after everything began. You remember
his words, his voice, the poet
he lectured on. You try
to remember the name
of that poet, whose work
you loved, wish
there were someone —
anyone — to ask; and this
reminds you of all
that’s been lost. You picture
the classroom, the rows
of students. This one
dead. That one. And that one
as well. So many. You wonder
what they’d be doing now.
Whether their bodies
would be whole
of broken.
Whether they’d know
the poet’s name.

Day 961

for Osama Mallouh, one year old

Are you sleeping now
somewhere in the afterlife
between your mother and father,
who were also killed? An airstrike,
Nuseirat. Do you turn
to your father there and show him
your head wound, your
stopped heart? And ask
(in the speech
of the afterlife) Why?
Do you wonder
what it would have been like
to go to school? To laugh
with friends? To run with them
across a field? Do you think
how fine it would have been
to have long legs, arms
strong enough to lift
a stone, a carton
of food, a child
older than you
ever got to be? To have words
you could speak and write
like your cousins,
so you could tell everyone
what you felt, what you thought?
How could you have disappeared
into the afterlife
without leaving a story? A footprint? A cry?

Day 960

Joud Muhamad al-Dweik

He’s almost as long
as the three men, walking
side by side, who carry him,
wrapped in his shroud,
the last clothing he’ll wear.
One of the men is young —
could be his brother,
his friend. He’s
looking down, head
bowed, at the body
he carries, remembering
what Joud, 13, was like
yesterday, when he was alive.
A boy. A boy who ran,
played ball, gathered wood
for his family.
Who grew, grew, in spite of
starvation, in spite of
fear, until it took
three to carry him
to the place in the earth,
where he will break down
to nothing again. Where
he will not be a tall boy
anymore, or ever
a man, a father,
a worker, but dirt
and minerals.

Day 959

Child, born just before
the genocide started —
you lived through ten displacements.
You lived through the fire
in the tent encampment —
I ran, I carried you
in my arms, stood,
shielding your nose
from the smoke, the
smell of it. You lived
through starvation,
through meals
of watery rice and milk.
You lived when your cousins
were martyred, when your uncle
was martyred. Lived
when rain and wind collapsed
our tent, when a fetid moat
established itself around it,
when rats nibbled our toes.
How, child, could you
have survived all that,
only to be taken now
by death? Only to be shot
while holding your father’s hand
on a street that, moments
before, was quiet?

Day 958

The whole building is burning.
A woman’s two arms
have been severed;
how will she lift her children
out of the flames? A toddler
someone dragged out
is screaming in pain.
In terror. Who
will tell us his name? Who
is left, of all those
who were sheltering
there, to take care
of him now? Mothers
and children, children
racing downstairs with other
children’s mothers —
trapped in the firestorm, all
ashes now. Ashes.
Indistinguishable now
from the remains
of tables and beds
and wooden floors.

Day 957

A child — you can tell
from the handwriting — has written
a name on a slab of concrete
propped up against other slabs
near the remains of a building
that was once filled
with apartments, filled
with families.  A child
has written the name
of another child.  Beneath it,
dates:  birth date
and death date.  You read the dates,
calculate.  The dead child
was seven.  Seven.  Did he die
in a bombing? Did the place
he’d lived in collapse
around him?  Did his whole
family die with him?  Or
were they saved?  Oh,
he might have died
from starvation.  From
some illness that might
have been cured if there
had been medicine.  From
a sniper’s gunshot
when he was out
in the street.  And the child
who wrote his name —
was that child a cousin?
a sister or brother? a friend?
a neighbor? a beloved classmate
from a school
that is also gone?
And is that child,
the one who wrote
name and dates
to preserve the memory,
so the child who lived
seven years would not
be wholly erased
from this world — is
that child,
about whom we
know nothing, still living?

Day 956

What would it take
to buy this child
a piece of fruit?  An orange,
a plum?  She’s five.  She’s just
come from the hospital,
aching with fever, frightened.
Her mother is carrying her
to their tent.  Weeping
because she has no money
to buy fruit for her daughter.
And if she did, where
would she get it?  It seems
so little, a piece of fruit.
Once they lived near an orchard.
Once they sat under
abundant trees
on quiet, sunny afternoons
eating fallen fruit
and fruit that was low enough
for a small child, held
in her arms, to pluck.

Day 955

If they would only
let the medicine in,
your child could get better.
She lies on her little mat,
barely moving, her body
conserving what energy
it has.  Mostly
she sleeps.  The medicine
she needs for what’s likely
pneumonia isn’t available.
Your friend the doctor
has said her body must learn
to fight the disease
itself.  Aren’t we
fighting everything
ourselves? you
ask him, your voice
weakened from worry
and sleeplessness.  Why
ask it too of a child of four?

Day 954

He had an uncle
who used to take him to the beach
to fly kites.  A young uncle,
an uncle who might have been
his older brother.  They would run
on the sand, looking out
at the endless water, their two kites
weaving and dipping, sometimes
tangled together, then pulled back
so they could untangle them, then
flying free again.  He had an uncle
who told him (one afternoon
flying his kite) that he wanted
more than anything to swim
out into that endless sea
until he could reach a place
where no one lived under occupation,
where people were as free as the gulls
who themselves dipped and wove
between their kites.  There, his uncle
had told him, he would be able
to do all the things he dreamed
of doing.  The boy now, standing
on that beach alone, wonders
whether the place his uncle went to
when he was martyred
has that same sky, those same gulls.
Whether his uncle is playing ball,
racing down vibrant streets
with his friends.  Whether his uncle’s
tall young body,
that was shattered in fragments,
has been made whole again.