Day 994

Why, when everyone
seems to have turned their eyes
from you, has your child
been suddenly trapped
under the rubble?
She was playing
in front of an abandoned
building, a building
where once people lived.
She knew to watch the sky;
everyone knows, now,
to watch the sky. Why,
when the world
is using terms like ceasefire,
has nothing ceased? Why
this child, who was delicate,
small, who couldn’t
have harmed anyone?
Now she is buried
under stone and concrete.
Now she is silent
under the ghosts
of those who lived there.
Now they’re accepting her
into their lifeless company.

Day 993

A grandmother sits outside her tent
on a wooden box someone
has found for her,
quietly rocking back and forth.
She is trying to count
the children and grandchildren
she has lost. Once
they lived together
in a large house, in many
apartments: the children
played together, they ate
dinner together, the adults stayed up
talking half the night
while the children slept
peacefully in their beds.
Now the house is gone,
and so many of them
are gone. The son
who was a journalist, the daughters
who were doctors. The boy
who wanted to be
a football star, the walls
of his room covered with posters.
The girl who spent hours
drawing and painting, who drew
pictures of her martyred friends
until she herself was martyred.
The grandmother counts
and loses count, starts
over again, loses count
again. Her hands
are empty, her arms empty
that held one infant
after the next. How many?
How many more?

Day 992

He is learning to run
with his prosthetic leg.
Once he was the fastest runner
in his school. Faster
than his dad, faster
than the older kids.
Now his run is slow,
his metal leg like a music stand
or a strange small tower;
but every day he runs
a little farther, challenges himself
to run to that pile
of rocks, to another.
His days are a calculation
of strength and distance,
of how much he can do
that he used to do:
carry buckets of water?
Carry his grandmother?
Kick a football? Kick it
even harder, kick it
over that wall?

Day 991

for Ahmed Wishah

He was a photographer, a videographer.
When his brother was alive,
he would record the events
his brother reported on. When
his brother was murdered,
he took care of his brother’s
young children, more
like a dad than an uncle.
It was his way
of mourning his brother,
his soulmate, his closest friend.
He knew, with his brother
dead, that his task was to live.
Now he too has been murdered.
Now he has gone
to join his brother. Now
his brother’s young children
have lost him
as well as their father.
Now truth has lost
yet another witness.
Now someone else
will need to tell
his story. Now all the photographs
and videos he would have taken
will need to be taken
by others.

Day 990

for Bairbre, again

When the rescuers come
to dig him out of the rubble,
the man, still buried
from his shoulders down,
looks up at them, tells them
to go away. His eyes,
his grimace,
reveal a mixture
of horror and pain. His daughters
are buried far deeper
than he is, he
tells them; he is holding
their hands. No way
to get them out from under
the concrete slabs, the rocks.
The pressure of death.
He needs to stay with them.
He needs to keep holding their hands
until they loosen their grip
on him. On their lives.
He is their father. All
these years he has done
what he could to protect them.
To reassure them. How,
now, even when surely
it will cost him his life,
could he abandon them?

Day 989

from a photograph

He tosses his child
into the air
as parents have always done
with their small children.
The boy could be eighteen months.
He laughs wildly, flying there
as children have always
wished to fly
against the clear blue sky
for a moment; then
falling safely
into his father’s waiting arms.
Over and over they repeat this:
release. Toss. Catch.
They are playing a game
of exhilaration. They
are rehearsing — given
that drones, at any moment,
may cross that sky; given
that this father
cannot promise he will always
be there when his child
completes his descent —
they are rehearsing
loss. Abrupt
disappearance. The impossibility
of being sure. Despite
their smiles, the hilarity
of their game, they
are preparing for when
the child may fall
into nothing. For when the father
may lift his arms and receive
into them no warm
living giggling boy.

Day 988

In a tent
that barely shields them
from anything — not
sudden rain, not summer heat,
not drones, not airstrikes —
a man is teaching a song
to children. He stands
while they sit, cross-legged,
eyes riveted on him
and his guitar.
Each one in this tent
is sitting behind a pillar
of losses: mothers, fathers,
siblings, friends. Houses,
schools, limbs. Yet
their voices are strong,
ring out as they learn
the song, line by line.
Ring out over the sounds
of everything
bent on destroying them.
Ring out, defying hunger,
pain, hopelessness. Ring out
as though the dead
who are crowding this tent
could hear them. Could even
begin swaying their ghost-bodies
in something like a dance. See!
They are moving the tent itself
in the morning air.

Day 987

for Abbas Abu Jabal

We will not say his life
was wasted, though
he was killed at fifteen
for playing football
in the street near a car
that was hit in an airstrike.
What is wasted is all the life
he might have had: all
the days, all the friendships,
all the work, all the kicking
and running and studying
and loving. What is wasted
is all he might have given.
All the words he might
have spoken to his parents,
his brothers, his cousins.
All the words he hadn’t
even learned yet, that
he might have written sometime
to tell others his thoughts,
the things he had lived through.
Now that task remains to us.
His presence here — his
strong young body, his
swiftness, his athletic
legs — was vibrant, even joyous.
Was not wasted on those
who loved him. Who watched him
even moments before he was murdered,
launching a ball far against
the summer sky. Farther
than he himself
would ever go again.

Day 986

for Bairbre

A man sees the body of a child
trapped under the rubble.
A whole body, a girl’s body,
clothes soaked in blood.
He checks to see
if she’s breathing. She’s not.
He holds her lifeless body
by the shoulders, tries
to pull her out. He can’t.
One of her legs is crushed
under heavy concrete.
It’s keeping her trapped.
In the distance, the man
sees starving dogs, dogs
who once belonged
to families, several
of them, devouring a corpse.
He takes a pocket knife, begins
to cut into the place
on the child’s leg
where it’s trapped,
so he can begin to free
her body. So it won’t
be the next to be eaten.
So he can bury it
in a quiet place,
under trees, where
it can rest. He works
and works. Skin, muscle.
ligaments, bone. Uses
whatever instruments
he can find. It takes
a long time. At last
he lifts the girl, without
her trapped leg,
out of the broken slabs of concrete
that had been her home.
Picks her up tenderly,
his jacket stained
with her blood. Carries her
as though she had been
his own daughter,
to a place near
what had been a meadow
where he can begin
to dig her grave.

Day 985

A child of seven is killed
holding her father’s hand.
Her father is also killed.
Where were they walking?
Where had they been?
What were the last words
they said to each other?
What was the last meal
they ate? Who
was the last child
the girl played with,
outside her tent
on a summer morning
that day or the day before?
A child of seven. Everything
she had learned — reading,
a little arithmetic, the names
of rivers and continents
and birds — everything
she’d worked to memorize
lost now. Useless. Gone.
She died holding
her father’s hand: some
slight comfort? Their blood
flowing together
in the dusty street.