Day 172

Suppose we came back as ghosts asking the unasked questions….
(Adrienne Rich)

Listen to the voices of those
who died sleeping in their beds
who died sitting in their rooms
who died walking by the way
who died stepping down their stairs
who died standing in line for food
who died talking to their sisters
who died holding their infants
who died running to save their children—
they hover among the living, the barely living
Their words are carried on the wind
The cries, the anger, the questions
they never got to ask
The air around the fallen buildings 
gray as concrete, not empty, populated 

Day 170/171

Guernica.  The head thrown back,
mouth open, an angle
wider than any human mouth, a scream
unending, uncontainable. Agonized.
Never to forget.
Hours, whole afternoons
standing in front of it
at the MOMA in New York.
The faces the contorted bodies
At fifteen, taking the Long Island Railroad
into the city, then the subway.
Week after week
to stand before the painting over and over
compelled to study it, to take it in
by something I couldn’t – then –
understand   Yesterday the video
of a child, maybe Dashiell’s age,
alone, no parents, carrying
an empty carseat
through the streets of Gaza
crying to no one, no one 

Day 169

I made a note about shoes.  The children are shoeless.
Small feet make their way
over broken ground.  Torn wire,
jutting bits of concrete.  Why would you say ‘be careful’?
They dig in the rubble for something to eat. There’s nothing.
There has been nothing for weeks.  How
can they still be walking, moving?  Where are their shoes? 
A mother frantically looks for her child’s shoes
but she has gone mad with hunger, grief; it’s her child
she’s looking for. I made a note
about feet.  How perfect they are
when a child is born, the toes ten pearls.
How soft before they touch the earth.

Day 168

A branch of the tree outside my window
blown down by the wind.  New growth on it
green-golden, no chance for these leaves
to uncurl, extend.  A woman weeps outside her tent:
I have nothing to feed my baby.  He was born
three days ago, my breasts have not filled.
All day he cries because he is starving.
She has been living on weeds, birdseed.  I sit
at my desk, watching a wind tear through the garden.
Between my firstborn and my second I carried a child
seventeen weeks, felt her move within me, then bled and bled
one night, blood soaking the sheets.
It was not the child I bled, but what fed her. Held
her. The ultrasound
showed her unmoving in my womb.  Not viable
was what they told me, which meant she was dead.  Starved.
The branch lies under the tree. Rain. Ants beginning to swarm there.
Life feeding on death. This woman
is holding her infant: his wide eyes, thin legs.
His crying is so faint, it is almost silent.  If
she had milk for him he might open like a leaf.

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.