Day 948

How many times
have you been displaced?
How many bombings
have you witnessed?
How many friends
have you lost?
How many sisters? brothers?
Uncles? Aunts? Parents?
Grandparents? Teachers?
How many days of school
have you missed?
How many pounds
have you lost?
How many arms and legs
do your friends not have anymore?
How many days
have you gone hungry?
How many nights
have you spent with rain
raining into your tent?
(Flooding it.  Bringing it down.)
How much wood
have you gathered for fuel?
How many mornings
have you awakened crying?
How many rats
have you seen in your tent?
How many pieces of flesh
of how many children like you
lie strewn on the ground?

Day 947

He wanders through the rubble
as though he’s looking
for something he lost.  Turns over
a rock, a fragment of a wall.  He’s
nine or ten, skinny; his clothes
barely fit.  His fingers
are raw from digging
through all this debris.  
There’s no one with him:
no father, no mother, no
brother, no friend.  He
does not seem to be walking
in any particular direction;
it’s possible he keeps turning over
the same gray things, finding nothing
but worms or mold or fungus,
turning them over again
as he retraces his steps.
No one to pull him away
from his senseless task.
No one to help him let go
of whatever it was
he set out to redeem.

Day 946

Where are you, older sister
who used to braid
my long hair?  Every morning,
your strong hands
on my head, patting it tenderly
when you were done.  Where
are you, who studied
late into the night
and woke early, singing
as you walked
through the corridors
of our house?  Where
does a voice go? Laughter?
Footsteps?  How
could those rooms
not be anywhere
anymore?  Like you,
they pulsed with life:
our running, our shouts
to each other to join
some game.  Sometimes
our tears.  How,
my sister, sister who came
into this world
before me, who tasted it,
learned it, told me
about it — how,
when every cell I am
is filled with you — how
can you not be here?

Day 945

You lie on the floor
of your tent, trying to remember
the girls in your
third grade classroom, the day
before the genocide:
one in the corner of the front row,
her whole family murdered, her house
gone.  The girl who sat
next to her:  her brothers martyred,
the rest of them displaced,
over and over.  The two
who filled out that row:
each of them lost
a leg.  One had been
a dancer, had performed
only days before.  You lie there,
counting each one:  some
whose names you can’t
remember, some who were
your best friends.  The two
you walked home with
every day, twins
whose kitchen table was where
you all did your homework, laughed
together, ate fruit and bread.
Where are they now?  Where
is their mother, who stood
behind you at the table, gently
correcting your arithmetic?
Their faces remain
with you and disappear.
You imagine the rows, rows
of girls smiling when they saw you
come into the room.  Never again.
Never.  Never again.

Day 944

What will you do
now that everyone you loved
is gone?  Your small son
was the last to be killed.
Every day in the tent
you’d read to him, sing
to him.  Fend off cold,
hunger, rats.  Hold him
so tightly it seemed
you were always rehearsing
for the moment
that just now happened,
when Death finally
came for him, won
the battle, snatched him
out of your arms,
took him away
to his dark storage cellar.
Now there is no one
for you to protect.
No one to cry out to you
in the night
from fear or hunger,
no one to slip
a small hand into yours.

Day 943

A choir of martyrs
visits you in your sleep.
Your father, your uncles.
Your eldest brother.  His friend.
Your teacher.  The families
in the building across the street.
The orange cat your grandmother loved.
A professor you wanted to study with.
The woman who worked
at the bakery.  The baker.  The grocer.
The ten-year-old boy out looking
for firewood.  Climbing the rubble.
The choir of martyrs stands
by your side. Is there
something they
want from you? Some
are still bleeding.  Shrouded.
Silent, mostly;
though sometimes you hear
a low moaning
that seems to permeate
the walls
of your tent: A sigh.  A word
here and there.  A name.

Day 942

What will we feed this child?
This perfect newborn?
This gift, this radiant defiance
of the genocide?
His mother is so thin,
her body can’t make
the milk he needs
to stay alive.  The trucks
supposed to bring food
are held up, prevented
from coming in.  They wait
at the border, hover
like desperate birds
unable to reach their nests
where hatchlings
huddle with open mouths.
No formula.  Nothing.
Will you make sugary water
for him?  Will there even be
enough water? How will
he grow?  How will you
gather all he needs
from the nothing, the less
than nothing, you’re given?

Day 941

The child sits alone
on a concrete slab.
No one from her family
is with her.  No one alive.
She’s trying to remember
the sound of her father’s
voice, her mother
singing to her, her brothers
laughing, playing a game
on the front steps of their house –
that, too, disappeared.
Her grandmother
talking softly to her
while bending over her garden.
Why, when the buzz of a drone
is so familiar, does it feel
so hard to recall
those voices?  Why,
when now she can tell
one kind of warplane
from another, is it so
impossible to picture
the exact green-blue
of her sister’s eyes?

Day 940

…Once we had a house.
Once we had a country.
       — Mahmoud Darwish

This is your home, my child.
These shivering panels
that stand for walls.
This trembling roof:
trembling from cold? from wind?
from fear?  This near-transparent floor
caked with mud and dust, that falls
and rises with the shape
of the ground.   This
is your home: fragile,
volatile.  This
is where your mother
birthed you, where
you were conceived.
This is all we can offer
to protect you from summer
and winter.  From airstrikes
and fires.  This delicate
membrane, this jacket
of rags, of nylon. Canvas.
Paper.  This is where
the fiction of solidness
concludes.  Where we learn
how transient we are. Where
we know we can count
on nothing.

Day 939

Dr. Abu Safiya

Remember the tender care
he gave your child,
the way he spoke to her
when she was brought
to his hospital:  the gentleness
of his hands, wrapping bandages
over the wound, the place
where the bone was severed,
place where now your daughter’s leg
ends.  Remember
how he held her head,
her hands.  Remember
the words he spoke
to you, the kindness in them.
Think of this now
as the doctor grows thinner,
as the cruelty of the guards
grows more intense, as rodents
and insects infest the prison food.
As the doctor is gradually
being killed…