Day 1,132

Who did they leave
behind, this father
and his thirteen-year-old son
killed yesterday in Gaza City?
Was there a sister who looked
to her brother for comfort,
protection? A younger brother
who squabbled with him,
but counted on him
to teach him football,
long division? Was there
a mother who lost her son
and her husband in the same
moment? Who now
has to look around
and wonder how
she will manage
on her own? What
did they leave behind?
Memories of their home?
Shelters where they’d been
displaced? So many other times
they’d escaped, they’d witnessed
other killings, buried
others they’d loved?
Now it’s their time
to be grieved and buried.
Now the ones who remain
are waiting their turn.

Day 1,131

The rain
has washed away
everything you had:
your tent, your blankets,
your children’s clothes.
Washed away. Ruined.
The tent fallen in on itself,
irreparable. The clothing
so soaked it will never be dry,
so full of raw sewage
it will never be clean;
so flimsy the water
stretches it, tears it apart.
What, now, will you do?
Once you liked to listen
to rain, the first rains
of autumn after months
of heat. Once the rain
was something you hoped for.
What do you hope for now?
Standing among the wrecked tents
of your friends, a chorus
of crying children, shivering
in the wetness: where
can you go? What
will you do
to keep yourselves warm?

Day 1,130

Imagining Dr. Abu Safiya

Kind pediatrician, are you
still alive? In the bleak cell
where they’re keeping you,
do you think of the children
you cared for, all those years?
The one who was brought to you
with a bullet in his neck. The one
whose right leg was half-severed
from his body. The girl whose hand
was shattered, who loved
to draw. Before the guards
break into your thoughts
to beat you again and again,
do you remember the ones
you saved, the boy
who sat up after the surgery
and looked at the bullet
you held in your hand?
The boy who slowly
relearned to walk
on both his legs? The girl
whose mother brought you
the drawing she made of you,
months after she lay
in her hospital bed, you
tenderly holding both
her small hands in yours?

Day 1,129

In the pit of night
a rat bit your child’s toe.
He woke, screamed. You
opened your eyes
to see the rat hurry
across the floor of the tent,
already starting to flood with rain.
Your little boy’s blood
staining the rainwater.
You take an edge of the blanket
and wipe your son’s toe. Little toe,
perfect toe: what
will you put on it
to keep it from getting infected?
You have no ointments, no medicines.
Not even a strip of gauze
to wrap it in. Rain
is beating against the flimsy walls
of the tent. Your child still crying.
His face contorted
in pain. In fear. Will
more rats come? he’s asking you.
If I sleep, will they come
and bite me again?
You would lie in order
simply to comfort him,
to let him fall asleep peacefully again,
but you can’t do it. All
you can do is hold him
and rock him, there
on the watery tent floor;
there in that place, targeted
by more instruments of torment
than you could name.

Day 1,128

in solidarity with Abubaker

You’re searching for your friend,
the friend you knew
since you were small, when
you played together
on the beach, in the dirt
in your front garden. You’re
searching for the friend
you went to school with, played
football with on the field
a short walk from your house.
He’s not there on the field.
Not anywhere you can find him.
Scattered pieces of him
are buried in dust, hidden
behind stones. Where
is his bright smile? His
powerful kick that could drive
the ball nearly across
the whole field
into the goal? Have they gone
to feed rodents? Insects?
He was your friend. Murdered
while playing football. Fifteen
years old. Everything
he practiced so hard for
gone.

Day 1,127

How many children murdered this week?
Enough to fill a classroom, a classroom
that’s been, itself, destroyed. One girl
in her tent, eating her breakfast.
One boy walking to get wood. Another
walking to get water. A girl
sitting beside her friend, showing her
the book she’d been reading. Her friend
killed also. The book
stained with their blood, unreadable.
This four-year-old
on his grandfather’s lap
at a café the grandfather
took him to, to distract him.
This teenager, who brushed
and brushed her long hair,
strafed. Shredded. Her hair
still shiny, streaming
behind her in the dust
from her bloodied head. How many
children? How many desperately
grieving parents? How many more?

Day 1,126

Rimas al-Madhoun

The girl
shattered in fragments
before her father’s eyes.
Seventeen years old.
Living in a tent
in the encampment.
Displaced how many times?
The bomb released.
The girl in pieces. Her body
exploded. An arm here,
a leg there. Fingers.
Feet. Her head.
Her beautiful smile.
Shattered. Shredded. Her father
standing beside the tent, holding
one of her arms. How many times
had he held that arm? his child
learning to walk,
to ride a bicycle, climb a tree,
take one cautious step
after another
on a high narrow ledge.
How many times
had he placed a hand
on that arm
to guide her through a crowd
at a busy market,
help her balance herself,
stop her from some
impulsive act,
in solace, in comfort, in reassurance?

Day 1,125

Once you dug
through the rubble of your home
to find the necklace
your grandmother had given you.
How is it possible
that you found it? Shiny
golden chain with a locket
on it, that she gave you
when you turned twelve.
She died a year later,
before the genocide.
After the bombing
you dug and dug.
Two friends and two
of your brothers
dug with you. At last
you saw something
catch the light:
shiny golden chain,
golden locket
with pictures inside
of your grandmother
and grandfather.
More bombings.
More rubble. Your brothers
gone, the friends
who dug with you
gone. Now the necklace
is all you have. You never
take it off. Your grandparents
stay with you, move
with you from tent to tent,
displacement to displacement.
This, you tell your one
remaining sister, is how
you’ll be identified
if you too are martyred:
shiny gold necklace, gold locket
catching the light. Even
if the rest of who you are
is scattered among the ruins.

Day 1,124

She told her mother
she was going to buy bread.
Bread to have with the soup
her mother was making:
a vegetable soup, a handful
of lentils. The girl knew
there wouldn’t be enough
for her parents, her grandfather,
the two uncles who lived with them
in the tent. She knew
it would help to have bread
to stretch the meal farther,
to feed her pregnant mother,
her uncle healing from
a head wound. She was going
to buy bread. Only bread.
That’s what everyone said
at her funeral. Bread
from the woman who baked it,
sold it from a small table
outside her tent. That’s all
the girl had been doing:
walking from her tent to another.
That’s when the soldier, sitting
and smoking in a room
in some other place, caught sight
of the girl. Inhaled. Ordered
the quadcopter to position itself
above her. Exhaled. Commanded it
to fire.

Day 1,123

Sixty-eight million tons of rubble
lie over your land.
The breath of your children, your grandparents,
teachers, doctors, farm workers,
preparers of food. Sixty-eight million
tons of waste: walls, ceilings, floors.
Weddings. Births. Funerals. First days
at school. First words. First steps.
You look out to where there were fields,
orchards, planted rows of vegetables:
everything gray. Everything jagged.
Everything covered and hidden.
Sixty-eight million tons
that had been cities, hospitals,
schools. Cafés where people met
to speak of the days they lived,
the books they read, the work
they did. Sixty-eight million tons
of everything that had been built
over the years, over the ages,
built with love, reverence, care.
You stand looking out at the grayness.
You imagine the world stirring beneath
what you see. One day, you tell
your daughter, standing beside you,
this will be cleared. We will work
to clear it, to bring what is beneath this
back to life.