photo by Ali Hamad/APA
When the genocide began I started writing daily notes. The notes, many of them handwritten in various notebooks, were disconnected lines, images, stories I’d read or heard. Some of them evolved into poems, included in this collection; but it wasn’t until Day 167 that — having heard about a mother who was able to save one of her children but not the others, and a doctor who was saving the amputated limbs of wounded children, putting the limbs into boxes labeled with their names — I felt the urgency to document these tragedies in a whole poem every day, and that is what I will do until the genocide ends.
I intend to keep writing until the ceasefire is permanent — until Palestine is free.
Day 54
A woman picks wood from the rubble of her house.
Here was the table, here was the chest of drawers.
The rains have begun but some wood
is dry, having lain for days under fallen concrete. A few
bags of food still lie among slabs of concrete.
She had been storing them for the winter, that now has come.
She pulls out what she can, takes a match (how
could it still be there?) from her pocket, strikes it on a rock.
Unbelievably finds something she can use as a pot.
She will burn table and drawers and memories
to make soup for her children. Will the children
outlast the wood? Will the remains
of their lives, soaked or charred, find their usefulness,
soften these beans, these lentils, these enduring grains?
Day 53
Not all labor ends in sweetness –Adrienne. The line
has haunted me for months, thinking what it takes
to build a house, build a life, construct hour
after hour: books, meals, language. To end
like this? not in sweetness
but rubble? A father looking for his child
under bombed concrete, finding
a shoe, a torn piece of a shirt, broken wing
of a wooden plane. He holds
the shoe to his lips, kisses it. Remembering
how only hours ago he helped the child
put it on, thinking How his small feet
have grown, where
in all this horror can we find him
a pair of shoes that fit?