Day 999

A father and his three-year-old son
go to look at the land
that was theirs, fields
of vegetables, fruit, once
blooming, harvested. They walk
in the summer afternoon, the father
holding his child’s hand, when suddenly
they hear gunshots coming
from a nearby house. A bullet
shoots though the little boy’s
eye, exits through the back
of his head. The father
picks up his son. Then he, too,
is shot. His leg collapses
under him. Soldiers run
toward them, assault them.
The father is screaming at them
to save the boy! Save the boy!
The child still breathing. Bleeding,
but breathing. Save the boy!
Forget about me! the father
is screaming. The soldiers
ignore him. Do nothing
to help the child. A wind
bends the weeds, the bolted
vegetables in the field. When
the father awakens from a brief
unconscious moment, he sees
his son wrapped in a black shroud.

Day 998

Khan Younis

A young woman in a tent —
23 — and her year-old daughter
are killed in an airstrike. They
go down into the rows
of statistics of all
who have by now
been martyred. The mother’s
love, her fear for her child,
her longing for quiet, for sweetness —
gone. The child’s hunger.
Her efforts to stand. To walk.
Her words, or what
sounded like words. Also
gone. Her giggling
at her father, her uncles, the wind
moving through leaves. The horror
of those last moments:
gone. The flames, the explosion.
The awe of their first moments
together in this world:
that too is gone. What they lived
and what they might have lived.
The fragrant breeze
that touches their bodies now,
mothering each of them.

Day 997

They were playing
in front of their tent.
They were walking
to get water, to get
to school, to get food
for their grandmother, their
baby sister, the old man
in the tent next to theirs
who’d had both his legs blown off
in a bombing. They were sitting
in their classroom. They were singing.
They were on their way
to their uncle’s. To a stand
someone had set up
to cut hair. To a place
where maybe there was
enough water to wash
their clothes. They
were playing on a beach.
They were watching the tide
roll in and out. They were
trying to build something
like a house, but the walls
kept slipping, falling,
crumbling, kept being swept
away into the sea. Still,
they kept shaping it. Supporting
it. Fortifying it
with rocks and reeds. That’s
how their mothers
found them, rocks and reeds
lying beside their bodies, their small
dead determined hands
still covered in sand.

Day 996

From a photograph

On a sunny afternoon in June,
children are sitting in rows,
waving at the camera. It’s
their graduation day. From
what the viewer can tell
of their ages, it must be
middle school. One girl
in the front row wears something
someone had made to look
like a graduation gown, a keffiya
around her neck, a rolled paper
in her lap, secured by her hands.
She will not let this
slip away: not the diploma,
not the afternoon, not
the friendships, not the memory
of everything that has happened
before this day. Who will count
how many parents, sisters, brothers
aren’t here to watch? Who will number
the missing books, houses, limbs?
The displacements, the empty chairs
in the makeshift classrooms? Who
will say, in a year, even a month, which
of these children will still
be living?

Day 995

For Dr. Abu Safiya

How many days now
has it been
since they put you in solitary?
What can you measure the time by?
Light comes and disappears
through the narrow space
under the door to your cell:
is that daylight? A naked bulb
someone randomly turns on and off?
If there’s a meal — a piece
of bread, a cup
of watery soup — does that
signal breakfast? dinner?
You are alone and yet
not alone. Your hours
are populated by the screams
of patients you cared for, the sobs
of their mothers, hands
reaching toward you for help,
the voice of your son
lying under the earth
on the hospital grounds.
They crowd the small space
you’re confined in, torment you
with your frailty, your
helplessness, reach
for you in your fitful sleep.
How, if your lawyer
or anyone surviving
from your family
Is ever permitted to see you — how
will you know
the living from the dead?

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?