Day 968

They are going to see
their parents, who are
under the earth. The smaller one
holds her sister’s hand. Behind them,
their grandmother walks: she
has lost her daughter, they
have lost their mother. Their mother
and father lie quietly
in their graves. They
will not speak to their
children, will not embrace
them when they see them
approach. The smaller child
asks her sister if she thinks
their parents can hear the drones,
the warplanes, from under
the ground where they’re
living now. Her sister
doesn’t reply. She’s trying
to remember her mother’s face
when she smiled, her father’s voice
when he sang. The smaller one
doesn’t remember at all. For
the rest of her life, her mother
and father will be these mounds
of earth and stones, these wooden
markers with handwritten names
under a sky that’s clear, then menacing.

Day 967

You send her to collect wood
for a fire, so
you can warm some thin cereal
for the baby to eat.
She never comes back. Instead,
a neighbor comes
to your tent
carrying all the wood
she’d gathered, telling you
where he’d found her body.
Her strong legs that ran
out of the tent. Her strong arms
that would have brought the wood back
had it not been
for the sniper’s bullet. You send
your older son
with the neighbor
to bring back her body. For now,
the baby is crying
from hunger, more
and more intensely.
You build a fire
to warm his breakfast
with the wood that’s stained
with his sister’s blood.

Day 966

A father bends over the body
of his six-year-old daughter.
He bends and rocks, the movement
accompanying his weeping.
His child lies still. More still
than she has ever been.
Now she will never tell him again
about her day. About the birds
she saw or the wild mint
she discovered growing
in spite of everything.
Now the mint will continue
to grow and she won’t
come anymore to pick its leaves.
Now she won’t need
the shoes her cousin
passed down to her,
or the quilt
her grandmother made,
which they carried
from one displacement
to another. Now
he will never call to her
to come inside the tent
and eat the small meal
of lentils and rice
she never complained about.
Now he will speak her name
over and over and only
the empty air
will stir, undetectably, in response.

Day 965

A bomb explodes
on a mother
and her weeks’ old son.
The mother is killed
instantly; the infant
has one of his legs
blown off, bleeds
profusely, but is saved.
The mother is buried
with her infant’s leg.
Leg that grew
inside her, leg
she swaddled, bathed,
rubbed with oil.
The infant will grow now
with no mother, no leg
on the side that was held,
at that moment,
against his mother’s
body. Forever
he will remember the leg
by its absence. Will think
of it in the earth
beside his mother, a part
of him that accompanied her.
A part of him that will never
be separated from her.

Day 964

for Donya Abu Sitta, who wrote about this child

How old is this boy? Maybe
eight? Nine? Someone
has gouged out his left eye.
How could it happen? Were they
that close? Did they come up
to the boy’s face with some
lethal instrument? Or
was it an explosion
somewhere near, and the eye
was injured and couldn’t
be saved? Now for the rest
of his life, the boy
will have one eye — obviously
injured, to tell by the thickness
of the lens he wears over it.
His face bears the lines of pain:
pain from his eyes, the lost one
and the one that’s still struggling?
Pain from whatever else,
whoever else, he’s lost?
He stands on the food line
holding a small bowl,
hoping someone will pour
some soup into it, some rice.
He will carry it back to his tent,
share it with whoever else
may be there: his one eye
looking out at their grateful
smiles, his other
looking inward at all
he wishes he wouldn’t remember.

Day 963

for Menatela Abu Libna, age 6

A little bird
from the birds of Paradise,
her grandmother called her.
Now she is dead. Dead
at six years old. Murdered
just hours ago
while playing in front
of her house. Little girl,
little bird, are you
in Paradise now
with other birds? Where,
now, will we find
your singing? Your
joyful mischievous flitting
from place to place? Who
will come to sit
on the arm
of your grandmother’s
chair and chatter
to her at the end
of day? Little bird,
little delicate fledgling,
where have you flown? Who
will know who you are? Who,
now, will take care of you?

Day 962

Sometimes you wonder
what your life would be like
now, had there not
been this genocide.
You look outside the tent
at the bare ground, ground
covered with nothing
but rubble. You remember
your house, the houses
across the road, the trees
that lined that road, abundant
with leaves. You remember
sitting in the classroom
with the professor you admired,
who was killed only months
after everything began. You remember
his words, his voice, the poet
he lectured on. You try
to remember the name
of that poet, whose work
you loved, wish
there were someone —
anyone — to ask; and this
reminds you of all
that’s been lost. You picture
the classroom, the rows
of students. This one
dead. That one. And that one
as well. So many. You wonder
what they’d be doing now.
Whether their bodies
would be whole
of broken.
Whether they’d know
the poet’s name.

Day 961

for Osama Mallouh, one year old

Are you sleeping now
somewhere in the afterlife
between your mother and father,
who were also killed? An airstrike,
Nuseirat. Do you turn
to your father there and show him
your head wound, your
stopped heart? And ask
(in the speech
of the afterlife) Why?
Do you wonder
what it would have been like
to go to school? To laugh
with friends? To run with them
across a field? Do you think
how fine it would have been
to have long legs, arms
strong enough to lift
a stone, a carton
of food, a child
older than you
ever got to be? To have words
you could speak and write
like your cousins,
so you could tell everyone
what you felt, what you thought?
How could you have disappeared
into the afterlife
without leaving a story? A footprint? A cry?

Day 960

Joud Muhamad al-Dweik

He’s almost as long
as the three men, walking
side by side, who carry him,
wrapped in his shroud,
the last clothing he’ll wear.
One of the men is young —
could be his brother,
his friend. He’s
looking down, head
bowed, at the body
he carries, remembering
what Joud, 13, was like
yesterday, when he was alive.
A boy. A boy who ran,
played ball, gathered wood
for his family.
Who grew, grew, in spite of
starvation, in spite of
fear, until it took
three to carry him
to the place in the earth,
where he will break down
to nothing again. Where
he will not be a tall boy
anymore, or ever
a man, a father,
a worker, but dirt
and minerals.

Day 959

Child, born just before
the genocide started —
you lived through ten displacements.
You lived through the fire
in the tent encampment —
I ran, I carried you
in my arms, stood,
shielding your nose
from the smoke, the
smell of it. You lived
through starvation,
through meals
of watery rice and milk.
You lived when your cousins
were martyred, when your uncle
was martyred. Lived
when rain and wind collapsed
our tent, when a fetid moat
established itself around it,
when rats nibbled our toes.
How, child, could you
have survived all that,
only to be taken now
by death? Only to be shot
while holding your father’s hand
on a street that, moments
before, was quiet?