Day 67

(starting with a line from Joseph Stroud — from his poem Stitching the Woe Shirt)

As if sorrow were an ax  As if I could wield an ax
over shards of memory,  carapace of rubble
under the achingly gray sky   As if the heart were a wedge
holding anguish apart from a meadow 
where milkweed grows and it’s summer, stunningly hot,
where day breaks with a promise of heat to come
As if there were a place where no viciousness entered
As if grief could split wood, lay bare
the savaged living core  As if
my hand were a path  As if threads
of sorrow were woven through concrete,
could crack it open, reveal the tender flesh
beneath: soft bodies unburied, those
on whom Gaza fell, slowly become earth 
As if sorrow could name them hold them render them
(like an ax) a torrent of stars  Field of drifting stems

Day 66

(for Refaat Alareer)

You asked us to tell your story.
I begin with a stone.  I begin
with something worn smooth by earth or river.
It may have a voice though I can’t find a way to hear it.
It has surely been held, as I hold it, by others.
A child may have kicked it down a dirt path.
A dog may have carried it in her mouth
from one dusty place to another. What I know
about the stone is what I don’t know. What story, Refaat,
shall we keep telling?  The continuous one where you run
through walls of fire?  Where you walk for hours
through a ruined city, searching
for bread?  The one where you sit and write
while bombs fall everywhere near you?  (Not for you
those bombs or others, though the one
they intend for you will find you.  Has found you.)
What you loved in this world has not stopped following you.
What you named will not stop naming you.
This stone has known hardness and softness, sweetness
and desperation.  Once it was part of a mountain. 
The sky shaped itself around it. It was near
or far.  It was where people looked to find their way.

Day 65

My friend whose husband died
engraves what she calls ghost images beneath drawings
of crows, snakes, trees. The ghost images
are fainter, less developed, as though
they were on their way to disappearing
and yet leaving some trace of themselves. If
there could be a sound, a fragrance: the way,
after Mariolina died, I ordered a perfume she wore
years ago, when we were young,
and opened the lid to take in
her presence but also those afternoons:
poems we read together, music
we listened to. Refaat wrote a story about an old man
in Gaza who treasured a stone
he was told had come 
from Jerusalem: held it tenderly
in his hand, carried it everywhere, told his son
that, as long as he had it, he still had Jerusalem.
The son, impatient with his father, told him
the secret his uncle – who had given the old man
the stone – had told him never to reveal. He
revealed it: the stone was nothing, not
from Jerusalem, just a stone from the yard
of the uncle’s house. And the old man, who all
those years had believed he possessed a piece
of Jerusalem, undone by what his son
let him know, felt his life draining out of him.
The stone had sustained him and now
there was nothing. My friend
shows me another engraving: ghost images
of other birds, an intricate spiral that looks like the shell
of some primitive crustacean. Image behind image,
as though you could follow them deeper, farther,
and the images would never end, and at last
you would find yourself in a place where ghost
and body would merge, where the dead 
still had voice and touch, where a stone
found in anyone’s front yard 
would hold the soul of Jerusalem:
where, exiled by death or force,
you could hold the stone to your ear
and hear the long anguished familiar
wailing of prayer; feel the warmth
of the cobbled streets. The open sky. 

Day 64

I am not a name. I am a fire burning slowly
In the corner of a ravaged lot. I am a broken twig,
a slab of wood stripped
from an abandoned chair, floating
on lightly moving water. I am the final road
of the final neighborhood
before the continent plunges to its end. I
am the rock cliff, the clod of earth
that slips into the sea, dispersing
there; the one star rising
where birds thread a cloth of dark
that blankets current, word, stone.

Day 63

Fly into the darkness. The leaves are leaving the branch.
How can your voice not be heard again?
Are others willing to pick up the thread?
Once you played in the streets, a boy throwing a ball
for other boys. Fly fly fly. Difficult now to tell one street
from another: bombed-out buildings. An occasional bird,
whip of an engine. Cold is the wind. In an unlit room
someone picks up a pen. If the room is gone and the pen
gone and the poet gone and the the paper
taken up by the wind, will the poem still sing
among empty branches? Trees
lean into each other. The wood sighs. Rain
pelts the broken sidewalk. Winter is coming.

Day 62

What is it I’m looking for?  Some figs
lie on the ground:  ripe. No longer sweet.
December.  The fruit has outlived its time.
In summer a man I knew gathered strawberries.
Bent under blazing sun to pick them, a full tray of them,
sweetness for his child to taste.  Now the strawberries
are no more, the sun gives way to chilly rain, the man’s body
lies under rubble. Not even found yet. Not even named.
Another fig falls from the branch.  Far from there.
I leave it on this rainsoaked ground
to slowly decay, to become earth and winter. Word. Remembrance.

Day 61

(for Refaat Alareer)

Who am I to tell your story? I am not
your sister, your mother, your student.  I did not
sit with you in the dark, waiting for news
we did not want to hear. I did not watch
when your child was born, when you taught her
to read. I did not answer her
when she asked if planes
could destroy your house
even when the lights were darkened.
(the lights are all darkened now for weeks.)
I did not hold your head when your brother was killed
nor walk with you to the ruined place
where he was buried.  I did not smell the smells
of burning, of flesh rotting, flesh eaten by maggots.
Who am I but a listener, a gatherer of sounds,
a woman standing in line at a shop
where others buy bread, milk,
vegetables.  Telling myself I don’t know
whether I have words to make a narrative.
To braid memory into memory, invent
a room, a table, a conversation .
Telling myself (and the planes overhead
are not for me, not for me
the groaning of engines, the explosions)
I have never had anything to offer
but words, and that must be enough.

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?