Day 167

Why did I pick up this child
and carry her with me
from the ruined house
and not my other children?
Was she sitting beside me on the rug?
Had I been feeding her at the table?
Were we asleep together in the narrow room
that looked onto the garden?
A child’s counting game:  the garden is gone,
the room is gone, the table is gone,
the rug is gone.  The house is gone.
And the other children? the boy
with the bright laugh, the tall boy who ran
faster than all the others? the girl
who was too small even to know her name?
In boxes in the bombed childrens’ hospital, a doctor
is sorting severed limbs.  He labels
the boxes:  Hammad, foot.  Samira, right arm.
As though the limbs could some day
rejoin the bodies they came from.

Day 88

(The Graves)

The living sleep between their dead.
On one side this man’s three children are buried
together in a single grave,
the way they liked to sleep
in one bed.  On the other side
of him, his wife
in a grave with women
she didn’t know, whom now
she will know through all eternity.
Am I living? He asks himself.
In the night filled with drones
he can barely hear his own breath.

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.