Day 988

In a tent
that barely shields them
from anything — not
sudden rain, not summer heat,
not drones, not airstrikes —
a man is teaching a song
to children. He stands
while they sit, cross-legged,
eyes riveted on him
and his guitar.
Each one in this tent
is sitting behind a pillar
of losses: mothers, fathers,
siblings, friends. Houses,
schools, limbs. Yet
their voices are strong,
ring out as they learn
the song, line by line.
Ring out over the sounds
of everything
bent on destroying them.
Ring out, defying hunger,
pain, hopelessness. Ring out
as though the dead
who are crowding this tent
could hear them. Could even
begin swaying their ghost-bodies
in something like a dance. See!
They are moving the tent itself
in the morning air.

Day 987

for Abbas Abu Jabal

We will not say his life
was wasted, though
he was killed at fifteen
for playing football
in the street near a car
that was hit in an airstrike.
What is wasted is all the life
he might have had: all
the days, all the friendships,
all the work, all the kicking
and running and studying
and loving. What is wasted
is all he might have given.
All the words he might
have spoken to his parents,
his brothers, his cousins.
All the words he hadn’t
even learned yet, that
he might have written sometime
to tell others his thoughts,
the things he had lived through.
Now that task remains to us.
His presence here — his
strong young body, his
swiftness, his athletic
legs — was vibrant, even joyous.
Was not wasted on those
who loved him. Who watched him
even moments before he was murdered,
launching a ball far against
the summer sky. Farther
than he himself
would ever go again.

Day 986

for Bairbre

A man sees the body of a child
trapped under the rubble.
A whole body, a girl’s body,
clothes soaked in blood.
He checks to see
if she’s breathing. She’s not.
He holds her lifeless body
by the shoulders, tries
to pull her out. He can’t.
One of her legs is crushed
under heavy concrete.
It’s keeping her trapped.
In the distance, the man
sees starving dogs, dogs
who once belonged
to families, several
of them, devouring a corpse.
He takes a pocket knife, begins
to cut into the place
on the child’s leg
where it’s trapped,
so he can begin to free
her body. So it won’t
be the next to be eaten.
So he can bury it
in a quiet place,
under trees, where
it can rest. He works
and works. Skin, muscle.
ligaments, bone. Uses
whatever instruments
he can find. It takes
a long time. At last
he lifts the girl, without
her trapped leg,
out of the broken slabs of concrete
that had been her home.
Picks her up tenderly,
his jacket stained
with her blood. Carries her
as though she had been
his own daughter,
to a place near
what had been a meadow
where he can begin
to dig her grave.

Day 985

A child of seven is killed
holding her father’s hand.
Her father is also killed.
Where were they walking?
Where had they been?
What were the last words
they said to each other?
What was the last meal
they ate? Who
was the last child
the girl played with,
outside her tent
on a summer morning
that day or the day before?
A child of seven. Everything
she had learned — reading,
a little arithmetic, the names
of rivers and continents
and birds — everything
she’d worked to memorize
lost now. Useless. Gone.
She died holding
her father’s hand: some
slight comfort? Their blood
flowing together
in the dusty street.

Day 984

You sit on a rock
with your eyes closed,
trying to remember your father.
Every day his voice
grows fainter; every day
you’re afraid you’re forgetting
more about him. The touch
of his hand, the sound
of his footstep. What it was like
to lie in your bed
as he read you stories, poems,
before turning out the light.
Where is he going, that’s
more and more distant
from where you are?
And who were the characters
in those stories, the animals
whose sounds he imitated,
the old people whose words
he spoke in a voice
that sounded like cracked
cellophane? Your books
gone, your house gone.
Your father gone
since almost the start
of the genocide. You want
to tell him how you miss him.
You want to let him know
you write your own stories now.
You see him, a tiny point
far, far away. How
tall was he? What color exactly
were his eyes? What
was the smell of his jacket?

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.