Day 983

All of them grieving this infant.
He was just months old. He was trying
with all his might to live.
His mother had little milk,
his father had little money
to buy food for her so her body
could nourish her son’s. The Occupier
banned formula. Water was scarce.
But he was alive! He was smiling
and making sounds and watching
the movements of his hands.
He was the center of their happiness.
Now their life has no center. Now
his mother is folding his little shirts,
putting them in a small, clean pile.
Now his grandmother, his grandfather
are weeping over his small chest
that does not rise and fall, his eyes
that look, now, at nothing. The strike
that killed him instantly
killed no one else in the tent, though
the tent is useless, destroyed.
The tent wraps itself around his
stillness like a torn shroud,
hovers, fallen, over him like a bird
with broad wings, who always
intended to keep him safe.

Day 982

Her whole family was killed
in the airstrike: mother, father,
all her siblings. Now she’s
the only one left. Now,
at nine, she’s the only one
living. The one
bearer of memories, the one
mourner, the one carrier
of her father’s eyes, her mother’s
laugh, her sister’s secrets.
Who could say she survived?
How much of her
lies with them
under the earth?
How much of her
spends her hours, now,
looking for signs of them,
listening for their voices?

Day 981

for the murdered fishers

They cast their nets
into the sea, as they’d done
from generation to generation;
and the sea yielded
to them its treasure.
They were people of the sea,
the beaches, the small boats
mostly they’d built themselves.
They needed food, and food
was abundant there: unlike
the markets, where
there was little, and no
variety, and where
things were expensive
beyond their means. They
cast their nets
into the sea, into their fate,
into chance, despite
being forbidden, despite
the oppressor’s vicious eye.
Now the quiet
of their afternoon, their
hand-carved wooden boats
rocking gently
over the murmuring waves —
one fisher singing or calling out
from moment to moment
to another —
has been destroyed.
Now the boats drift, shattered.
Now the sea
that had been their livelihood
is streaked with their blood.

Day 980

Dr Abu Safiya

See how his face is marked
with the grief
of these eighteen months,
Not only the grief: the torture,
the humiliations. See
the weight he has lost,
the time he has lost,
the work he has lost.
His son’s lost life
inscribed on his forehead,
the patients he wouldn’t abandon,
still held in his broken hands.
He asks for his story to be told
by a friend, a journalist;
he doesn’t know — he’s been
so deprived of knowing —
the journalist
has been killed. Who, then,
will tell his story? Who will assure him
that the gradual death
inflicted on him — loss
by loss, beating
by beating — will not
be all we remember of him?

Day 979

What else
should he have done?
He was walking his mother
to the hospital. She
was in pain: her arms
hurt. Her chest.
She was weak
from hunger and lack
of sleep. He carried her
part of the way,
was surprised
at how light she was,
lighter than his young
daughter. He was carrying her
to the hospital, set her down
on a slab of concrete
when she said she
was thirsty and needed
water. What else
was he to do? He went
to get her water,
and while he was gone —
still within sight
of her — a sniper
appeared suddenly
and shot her. Shot her
before he could get
to her. Shot her
dead on the street
on a concrete slab
from a fallen house
that had held
someone else’s
life and now
held his mother’s death.

Day 978

Little one, your father
bent over your body and wept,
rocked, moaned, until
they wrapped you
in a white shroud
and took you away. Now
your father will never
walk with you sitting
on his shoulders. Now
he won’t teach you
how to peel an orange, laugh
as the juices run
down your chin. Now
there are thousands of words
you’ll never speak, names
of friends you will never know.
Songs your father will never
sing to you, books
he’ll never read to you,
facts about rivers and mountains
he’ll never teach you, looking
at maps together in fading daylight.
Now when your father is asked
how many children he has,
his heart will always stumble.
He’ll take a breath
that should have been yours
and remember your eyes
looking up at his
and sigh, and subtract one.

Day 977

His father is holding
his backpack, little backpack
the boy took with him
this morning when he went
to the tent school
he loved. Little backpack,
all that remains of his
eight-year-old son.
Stained with his son’s
blood. The father
strokes the bloodstain
as though he feels
something of his son
contained there. Little backpack
filled with notebooks, pencils,
books. Arithmetic problems,
a story about a donkey
the boy never finished reading.
The father will take it
back to his tent, will open
the notebooks, study
his child’s handwriting.
Read the rest of the story
about the donkey, the ending
where the donkey is found
at last by the child
who lost him.

Day 976

The last thing she remembered
was the look in her mother’s eyes
before she set out to get water.
She’d dismissed it, weary
of seeing her mother
in so much fear, weary
of “watch out and “don’t
linger” and “come back
quickly.” Wanting to be just
a fifteen-year-old girl
chatting with friends
in the afternoon warmth.
Laughing. The last thing
she saw after the sniper’s
bullet struck
was her mother’s hand
stretched out to her, mother
who wasn’t there, who
was waiting to take
the bucket of water
when she reached the tent,
which she never reached.
Mother who’d stretch her hand
out toward her when
she’d fall, when she
was first learning to walk
and run. Mother
who’d pick her back up,
set her back
on her way. Who now
would have done anything
to see her stand again.

Day 975

He looks at his hands.
Hands that are bruised, broken,
fingers fractured, deformed, blood
still streaming down
to his wrists from the latest
beating. Hands
that are shackled,
hands chained for hours
behind his back.
Once these hands
probed gently
into the living organs of children
to locate the wound, the infection,
the tumor. Once
these hands held the hands
of mothers, fathers, anxiously
waiting to learn an outcome,
a diagnosis. Once these hands
were tender and strong,
able to find the place
that needed them, sometimes even
lacking x-rays, scans. Once
they held their own wisdom.
Once they were warm and whole,
were instruments of repair.

Day 974

This mother was nursing her infant
with the thin, bluish milk
of famine. This mother
was feeding her two-year-old
watery soup, some slices
of carrot drifting among
a few beans. This mother
was walking toward her tent
when the bomb fell
on the hard ground
she stepped on, her legs
blown across the field,
the wood she’d been carrying
scattered. Her children
waiting: hungry, frightened.
This mother was sick
with an illness that could have been
cured, had there been
medicine. Her children
sat on the floor of the tent
around her for days, watching her
cough, holding wet cloths
to her forehead
to soothe the fever. Now
her body is cold. Now
there’s nothing more
they can do for her.
The oldest one covers
her mother’s face
with the blanket stained
with blood from her lungs.
Steps outside for a moment,
holds the tent’s flap open
so the night air, foul though it is,
can start to mitigate
the smell of death.