Day 1,094

The wheelchair you could use,
that would let you find your friends
and go to get water and visit
your uncle — it’s barred
from entry. Both your legs
were blown off
in a bombing, eight-year-old legs
that carried you everywhere,
danced to the music you loved,
climbed trees, ran holding a kite.
Two years later you’re wanting
to move like the other kids,
wanting to join them
where they’re huddled
at the edge of the tent camp.
Once you asked your mother
if your legs would grow back.
You still see the look
on her face when she answered.
For months you spoke to them
every night: your two
disappeared legs, your feet
you had just gotten
hand-me-down shoes for
from your sister, who’d
outgrown them. The shoes
sit useless in the tent: no one
to wear them. The legs
are nowhere or everywhere.
The wheelchair that would be yours
is piled in a warehouse with others:
miles away, a country away.
A life away from where you are.

Day 1,093

for Dr. Ali Tahrawi
“Am I a human being, or just scattered body pars awaiting an upcoming massacre?”

The fingers could find
a mass that had grown
under the skin. They
could palpate and tell
more or less its size, its
thickness. How soon
it would need to be
taken out. The feet
could walk for miles,
the whole length
of Gaza, run
when they needed to,
when an airstrike threatened,
when no shelter
was near. The eyes
took in everything: beauty
of the sun setting
over the sea, rising
over the orchards, lighting
the face of your child. Your beloved.
They took in ravaged fields.
trees stripped of leaves,
blood pooling on hospital floors,
maggots festering in wounds.
The liver, lungs, stomach, kidneys:
what remained for them
to take in? purify? excrete?
Like neighbors confused and scattered
in a village so filled with smoke
they could not find each other,
they waited, useless and confused,
for the final end to come,
the end of endings. Massacre. Blackout.

Day 1,092

Your grandfather’s olive trees
are gone. They are gone
from the field outside
his house, which is also
gone. They are gone
with his love for them,
the tenderness with which
he would hold the first olives
he harvested, look at them,
press them between his fingers,
tell you it was time to go
and bring the buckets, the ladders.
Time to take the olives
from the trees that had birthed them.
Time for your grandfather
to place both his hands
(shattered in a bombing
with the rest of his body,
with your grandmother,
your uncle)
on either side
of your head and tell you
to be still, to
take a moment and see
how beautiful they were,
these olives his trees
had produced; how beautiful
the silver-green leaves
of the trees, the field
they stood in, the sky
above them.

Day 1,091

Your hair was long, flowed
in waves down your back.
Your hands were graceful; they
danced when you spoke.
Often they were white with flour.
Often they held one of your children.
You moved among us
like a wind, a song: your feet
barely touching the ground.
You were that swift, that delicate.
When the airstrike came
you were walking from the place
where you went to get water.
Buckets swaying rhythmically
as you walked. A clear day. Your children
in the tent, waiting for you
to come home. To quench their thirst.
You were shattered in pieces. Ground
to nothing. Blood and fingers
in the dust. Clothes flung everywhere.
Water cutting rivulets into the earth.
How is it possible you’re no longer
alive? How could they massacre
a wind? Entomb in the dirt a song?

Day 1,090

The first friend of yours
who was killed — she went down
in an airstrike. Walking
to take medicine
to her grandmother. Holding
her little sister’s hand (her sister
killed too). The second one:
a bomb struck her neighborhood
while everyone was asleep.
Her bed became her grave.
Her building — turned to rubble —
a cemetery for her family.
The third friend starved
to death, her body
leaving this world
day by day, little
by little. The fourth
and the fifth
died together in a firestorm
when the place
they were sheltering in
was bombed. They’d been
studying math. They grasped
each other’s hands
at the sound
of the explosion. That’s
how their bodies
were found: so charred
they were indistinguishable
from one another.
Five friends. Girls
you had known
all your lives. Girls
who sat on a bench with you
at school, girls who laughed
and cried together. Who thought
you’d all grow old together.
Why, you ask yourself,
lying awake in the night,
why are they dead
and I, for now, still alive?

Day 1,089

What would you be doing now
if not for the genocide?
A group of teenagers
sit on the rubble — jagged
stones, broken concrete —
as day comes to its end,
talking about their lives.
One says she’d be
in medical school. Another
says he’d be farming
his grandfather’s farm:
peach trees, fig trees.
Another says she’d be married
to the boy she was planning
to marry, had he not
been killed in an airstrike.
Yet another speaks
of simpler things: she’d
be combing her sister’s
long hair, braiding it,
tying the braids with ribbons,
had her sister, who was four,
not been martyred. They sit,
watch the sun go down,
grow quiet as they look
beyond them over so many
destroyed buildings, collapsed
roofs, bombed-out gardens.
Bombed universities, bombed
hospitals, medical schools, farms.
What would their lives
have been? Who
would they be sitting with
now? What would they each
be going home to?

Day 1,088

She was sitting
beside her mother’s body.
Her mother had died overnight.
For days, her mother had not
eaten, spoken, moved.
There was talk in the tent camp
of getting her medicine; but
the hospital had no medicine
for her mother’s illness.
Only a little pain medicine, which
a neighbor put
on a cloth and held
to her lips. The child
had sat by her side
all these days. She
was the eldest, but
only eleven. What,
now, will she do
without a mother? (Her father
killed months ago.) How,
now, will she take care
of her sisters, her baby brother?

Day 1,087

for Ayub

Your mother was shot
in the head, sitting
and eating in the tent
in the displacement camp
where you would have begun
your life. A few more months
in the womb and you
would have come
into this world of raw sewage
and love, fetid smells
and the smell
of your mother’s hair.
Her breasts. Her hands.
She was shot. She was found
by relatives, in a pool
of her own blood. They
rushed her to the hospital,
still breathing, your tiny heart
still beating inside her womb.
The doctors did what they could
but they could not save her.
They delivered you, thought
they could keep you alive:
but no. You succumbed
along with your mother.
Ayub. Your parents had chosen
your name. Ayub, who never
got to breathe the air
of this world. Ayub:
you never were held
except when they carried you
to set you down in the earth.
No longer within your mother,
but lying beside her.

Day 1,086

A small child wanders
among the tents. His face
is bruised and streaked
with tears. He’s wearing
only a tattered paper diaper,
no shirt. No jacket.
An older girl walks
toward him, asks him
his name. He doesn’t
answer. His hands, too,
she notices, are bruised.
One of them bleeding.
The girl picks him up,
carries him back
to her tent. Is he too young
to know his own name?
Too frightened
to remember it?
To answer her in a way
she can understand?
Her mother will wash him,
feed him, begin,
later, asking around
for anyone who may know
who he is. What
has happened to him.
Who he might
have belonged to.

Day 1,085

A mother is stroking
her child’s hair
for the final time
before he is laid in the earth.
Brown hair. Silken. Hair
that used to cascade
over his eyes, that he
would swipe away
with a finger.
Hair that was dusty
from the dust he played in.
Hair she would brush
morning and evening
to shake out the dust,
watch it fall
like tiny brown-golden stars
on the floor of the tent.
Now she will not
use that brush again.
Now her small son
has become the last star
that has fallen.