Day 1,067

with gratitude to Eyal Weizman

Bulldozers move over the dirt,
picking it up, depositing it
somewhere else. Covering over
fingers, feet, portions
of skulls. Covering over
your grandmother’s tears,
your three-year-old’s cries
in the night. The earth
has become a mass grave.
Ten, twenty feet under the topsoil
a whole world is inhabited:
your friends, your neighbors.
Arguments. Conversations.
Words of kindness. Words
of love: all
buried, all covered over
by fragments of stone, concrete,
sheetrock. The objects
of their solitude, tools
of their desire: deep
in the ground they lie
and will never be found.
Will be bulldozed, hidden.
Taken to where they can’t
be dug up, identified, named.
Added again and again to the wreckage.

Day 1,066

Someone was making a fruit salad
for the children. Peaches,
grapes, cherries. The children
were playing in a makeshift pool
someone had made from a tub
he’d found buried
under some rubble. One kid
at a time, jumping in
and out. The others
laughing, shouting, splashing
those waiting their turn. It almost felt
like a regular day, a day
surrounded by other days,
a day that would be forgotten
because it was so simple.
Ordinary. Someone’s father
was making a fruit salad,
carefully trimming slices of peach
away from their pits. Then
came the airstrike. Then
was the end
of the excited shouting. Then
the tub overturned:
water and legs, hands, hair
spilling over the ground.
Shreds of ripe summer fruit,
too, everywhere.

Day 1,065

The boy, fourteen or fifteen, digs
through the rubble
of what may have been
his home. He has walked
all this way
from the tent camp he lives in.
Nothing looks the way it did;
but the angle of the hill
he can see from
where he’s standing
looks like the angle he saw
every day from his bedroom
window. He is digging
for his sister. His cousin.
His grandmother. He’s looking
for the smell of dinner
his mother cooked every night:
spices they’d planted
in the garden. Marjoram.
Peppers. He’s digging
for days spent with his two
best friends, digging
to pick up their long
conversation, unending
football games, secrets.
He is looking for morning light.
For the stripe of moonlight
across his bed. For his
grandfather’s voice.

Day 1,064

from a photograph

A mother stands at the opening
to her tent, which is not
a tent but some pieces of wood
from which panels of nylon
and a patterned bedspread
hang. She stands
holding her son,
ten years old. The boy
is naked except
for what looks like a diaper.
His legs so thin
they can’t bear his weight,
slight as it is. His arms
too: bones, over which
some thin skin is stretched.
You can see his ribs.
How long has it been
since he’s eaten? How long
since he walked? Played?
Sat up by himself? Pulled
a shirt over his head? And
his mother, holding him
as she held him
when he was an infant:
how much longer, she
must be wondering,
until death swallows him down
the rest of the way. Death,
the one thing around them
that eats and eats.

Day 1,063

For Israa and her mother

The child was nine. Killed.
Wrapped in a shroud: you can see
the one hand that is whole.
Her other hand shattered. Concealed.
Hand that turned the pages
of books. Hand that drew
animals, trees. Brushed
her hair. Hand
that wrote words. Stories.
That held forks. Spoons. Cups.
That worked with the other hand
to tie her shoes. All these months
the girl and her mother
simply trying to stay alive:
find food. Fill a bucket
with water. Her mother
grieving, dying
the following day
of injuries sustained
in the same assault. Her mother
who, for a moment,
before falling
unconscious, held
her child’s ravaged hand
in her own. Hand
she had held
from hour to hour
through nights of explosions.
From nightmare to nightmare.
Fear to fear. Now
she will hold it
from one eternity to the next.

Day 1,062

Khan Younis; from a photograph

The boy and his grandfather
are gathering clay, broken rebar,
pieces of metal and brick
from homes that have been
destroyed, to build
a house to replace the one
that is nothing but wreckage.
No cement; they hold things
together with what they can find:
nylon netting against the rain.
What has lain in waste, what
has been nothing but rubble,
will soon be wall, roof, floor.
Will shelter them. Keep them warm
or cool, according to the season.
What they can salvage, they use.
What they can do
with their hands, they do.
Soon they will have
a place to sleep, eat, live. Soon, beside
what the Occupier has blown apart,
a home will rise from the dust.
A window. A door. A place
that is theirs.

Day 1,061

Deir al-Balah

The girl, ten years old,
is being wheeled on a gurney
to the hospital, though it’s clearly
too late. Killed instantly
in an airstrike. Her perfect feet
stick out of the gray blanket
someone has wrapped her in.
Her father accompanies the men
who are wheeling her
through the wrecked streets.
Her face still, that had been
so animated. Her feet
still, that had run, climbed,
jumped. When they stop
at the hospital, her father
bends over her body,
kisses her face, weeps
so hard a brother or neighbor
pulls him away.
His child. His daughter.
His world. A doctor gently
wipes the dust, the remains
of the exploded ground,
from the child’s face.
Her eyelids. The skin
above her mouth. As though
he were wiping off milk
or red stains from strawberries.
No more milk, ever. No more
strawberries. It’s the fingerprint
of death he’s attempting
to erase, and cannot.

Day 1,060

There are no days anymore.
There is only (what used to be
Monday?) your mother’s body
bleeding out on
the ground; (Tuesday?)
your house destroyed; (Friday?)
the bombing that killed
three cousins; (Sunday?) the baby
dying of his injuries. There are no
months anymore, only (March?) when
will we eat again? (September?)
how long
has there been no school?
(January?) how long
does it take to waste away
from starvation? Time
is not measured by clocks
anymore, not measured
by planners, calendars,
pings on the computer.
It’s measured from explosion
to explosion. By intervals
between displacements. By
standing in line for food
and not getting it. By grieving
and pain and never enough.
By litanies of loss. By a burgeoning list
of names of the dead.

Day 1,059

for Tayyem Hamdan
and Abubaker Abed

The child was three.
He was standing with others
close to a bakery. Playing,
like any child. Then
the airstrike: it killed him.
Killed him. He
was a child.
Three years old.
A child no one is talking about.
Writing about. A child
who only wanted to play.
To live. To be with his parents.
So many children murdered,
only a handful named.
A man who grew up
in his city, Deir al-Balah, writes
in anger and sorrow
that no one
seems now to be
thinking about this child.
No one marking his death
but his parents, his family,
his neighbors. Let us now
bear witness
to the brute assassination
of this little boy.
His soft cheeks. His small hands.
His voice. The words he’d just spoken.
The place he would have
grown up in, brutalized also.
Let us never forget him.
Let him not be laid
in the ravaged earth
without our notice. Let us
imagine the touch of his fingers
on his mother’s face. His mother,
who will not touch him again.

Day 1,058

Your kids can’t fly kites.
You can’t have surgery.
You can’t get antibiotics,
insulin, dialysis, phenobarbital
for seizures. Baby formula.
You can’t find diapers for your baby.
You can’t get a prosthetic leg.
Your children can’t go to school.
You can’t get rid of the smell
of sewage. Rotting flesh.
You can’t eat cinnamon,
cardamom, chocolate
today. Tomorrow it will be
something else. You can’t
let your children play outside,
though children are shot
all the time
in the back or the neck or the head
while sitting quietly
inside their tents. You can’t
sit quietly. You can’t
talk loudly. You can’t
stand alone. You can’t
mingle with a crowd.
You can’t watch the sunset.
You can’t fish in the sea.
You can’t celebrate a birthday,
a birth, a graduation, a wedding
without fearing everyone there
will be slaughtered.
You can’t bury your dead.