Day 87

How could you be under the rubble?  I have wondered
whether you rose from where they had left you for dead,
went walking on shattered roads, 
hiding your face. Not speaking, not writing, picking up bits
of fallen food, living on grasses, rainwater, treebark.
Even now I cannot imagine you not alive.
I am thinking of one now who searches for what he can find
of his child:  a severed hand, a shoe, a part of a toy.
Are you wandering through ruined cities
now, witnessing us?  The living are so far from you.
Though maybe by now you are everywhere.

Day 74

Refaat said writers must write whatever the circumstances
and one of his students said Now we are all Refaat
I am failing, Refaat; I am failing to tell your story
I am losing days, hours, months
I am thinking now of what the dead must miss:
Never to hear again the closing passage
of Ralph Vaughan Williams’
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
Or the hymn by Tallis himself I learned to play
on a snowy day in New Mexico from Larry Lipnik.
The snow.   The Sangre de Cristo mountains.   My friend Susan Meredith.
I am thinking of everything there is to miss:
silken ears of my dogs   Their warm breathing.
I am thinking of Refaat’s body under the rubble.
His smile when Nora greeted him that last time on video.
What he will miss of his children, his wife, his students.
Sun-warmed strawberries in summer.
The streets of his city he loved to walk in:
No longer streets   no longer there   rubble, rebar.
(Never to hear again Nina Simone’s Ne me quitte pas)
Never to touch again skin, grass, petals

Day 73

My friend finds a dog under a car on a busy street.
Sits with her a while.  The dog accepts her, is not
frightened, doesn’t try to run.  She calls
the authorities, who tell her they can’t come
for the dog for at least a day.  Leave her there
they say or take her home with you. My friend
sits on the sidewalk a while longer, thinks.  
Picks up the dog, carries her
into her car.  The dog lays her head
on my friend’s knee as she drives.  My friend
feeds her, gives her water, puts down a towel
in a room where the dog can sleep.  The dog
doesn’t sleep; she follows my friend
through the apartment, watches her
while she cooks, washes up, sweeps the floor.
What is the point of this story, you ask?
The dog had no name, no microchip.
Belonged to no one.  Did she find my friend
or did my friend find her?  Yesterday I learned 
of a man who died, a student, young.  He fell
and hit his head and no one was with him
in his apartment.  How long did he lie there,
brain swelling, blood flowing like rushing tributaries
through the creases?  The place where language 
was encoded, the place that beat his heart, opened his lungs.
Slowly or quickly?  In darkness or daylight?  Aware
or unaware?  By the time he was found,
blood had vanquished his last thought.  The dog
sits now at the window of my friend’s apartment,
Named, tagged, waiting for her to come home.

Day 72

A child digs in the rubble.  This was her home.
She bends, dark hair covering her face.
How thin she is, how much younger she seems
than her age.  She digs.  Digs.  Frees something
that looks like cloth.  Pulls on it, digs more.
At last she extricates it from the concrete slabs,
holds it a moment to her face. 
A gray stuffed elephant, intact,
Like nothing else she has been able to find.
Small.  Worn. Still smelling of what’s gone.

Day 71

Everything you have had to forget, day after day.
In the corner of the room, a bird that lost its way
and flew in through the open window:  sat,
huddled behind the gauze-white curtain, chirping
but not hopping, his wings not moving. You approached
softly.  It was the third month of the bombings,
the radio was speaking of more who had died.
Many who had lost their way.  Were you there? Here?
A breeze stirred the curtain.  The bird 
shivered a little.  You put out your cupped hand.
You learned it was not impossible to pick him up.
He was warm.  So weightless you could barely feel him.
Everything you have forgotten;  yet there are some
who might still be saved.  Hard to awaken day after day, hard 
to keep remembering.  A bird in the corner:
on the carpet, behind the gauze-white
curtain.  There is no choice, you told
yourself or the bird, except to keep moving.  You carried him
to the window, held him so he could feel the bright air.
Then opened your hands and he flew. The leaves
moved gently and they received him.
The bird flew toward them, dipping and straightening.

Day 70

Something is waiting in the dark.
A man I know went to a part of the city
he was afraid to go to because it’s a part of the city
people fear, but when he got there — there
was a reason, something about fixing
the window of his car, which had been broken —
when he got there, the people were kind to him.
The repair shop was clean and newly painted.
There was a table with mugs, paper-wrapped teabags.  
Messages on the purple and yellow envelopes
the teabags came in, saying things like
Walk in sunlight and the shadows will fall behind you.

Day 69

Then poetry found me.
I was a child sitting by a window.
I was watching rain fall and leaves fall.
No one who went by in cars or on foot
looked up, no one knew I was watching.
Poetry found me when I expected no one.
I was a child.  Poetry found me. 
There was a war and another war,
Someone we knew fell from the sky and died.
My mother spoke of it, not wanting me to hear.
The death of the old man in the upstairs apartment
touched me, and what would happen to his cat.
After he died I think the cat died too.
Poetry found me. I was given words
about the old man, about the cat.  
Not yet about the war or the other war
but that came later, was being held for me
like books at the library I’d requested
that were waiting for me at the desk,
Would be given to me whenever I could come.

Day 68

In late afternoon my friend’s child plays with his dog.
Shadows of trees lie across pavement
like railroad tracks; not
trees you can touch but ghost trees.  Still,
the child plays at not stepping on them. 
Today I heard someone say
that, when the bombing ends, thousands of ghosts
will hang in the air over Gaza, will ask for time, for a last word.
Voices empty of bodies.  Moaning, imploring. 
My friend’s child throws a ball for his dog
and the dog chases it,
carries it back.  The child
throws it again:  farther. If I could draw his face.
Learn it by heart. What if he.  What if a bomb. This minute.
The dog bounds back to the child, the child takes the ball
from the dog’s mouth. Winter.  Night falls quickly. Shadows
deepen and disappear.  What heart
can I learn this by?  Everything, it seems,
is being absorbed into this darkness.

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.