Day 187

Were there windows here?  Did the windows
look out on other houses? Could you see, 
through the windows, the lives
being lived there?  Were there books?  Pens?
Did someone there sit at a desk and write?  Was there
a desk?  A child who came to play on the rug
near the desk, so she could be with her father? Mother?
Did someone write words and read them to someone else?
Was there a pitcher of water?  A stone
with some story of where it was found,
that could be used to hold down papers
blown by a wind when the window was opened,
which sometimes it was by a man
before he sat down at the desk, was aware
of the wind, the windows, the books.

Day 186

Now it is spring.  We have passed Autumn, Winter.
Always the sky is the same gray.  Bombs and the debris of bombs.
The air filled with the smell of garbage, rotting corpses.
Is this the way it will always be? the child asks
who cannot remember what it was like 
before.  His sister is holding his hand,
watching a starving dog pick at another dog’s body.
If I die first you can eat me, she wants to say
to her brother.  Instead she tightens her hand 
around his, as though her grip were enough
to keep him alive.

Day 185

(Khan Yunis)

When they return to their home they cannot find it.
The same concrete slabs lie on the ground everywhere.
Here there’s a scrap of a colored curtain.  Here the handle of a blue teakettle.
Is this how we find our lives again? What lives?
It’s months since the children went to school.
Months since they played in the street.
They do not know if anyone is still alive.
One boy is trying to remember the name
of the friend he threw a ball to
on the last day before everything ended.

Day 184

The children’s voices, their laughter
Their angry or delighted screeches
When we buried our friend we said how lovely
to lay him in the ground on a hillside
above a schoolyard, where he can hear
the voices of children    And of course 
it is we, visiting his grave,
who are comforted by the sounds of children playing
I am thinking now of the fetid air 
filled with open mouths
of children killed in mid-laugh, in mid-shout
I am thinking of Dashiell at his birthday today,
eight, playing on the floor with his little cousin
I am thinking of baby Dunny
sitting on the rug with Dashiell
eating steamed carrots, saying Dash and dog and dada
How his parents exult at each word
and how no words will come again
will ever come again from the mouths
of those other children

Day 183

The days unfold, each after each.
You wake, wondering if this is the last.
If I survive this, Abubaker says, though months ago
he was a student at a university.
To live with the taste of death always in your mouth.
To have little other food than that.
He dreams of going back to classes, but the rooms
are destroyed, the teachers murdered.

Day 182

The man is speaking of beauty,
the beauty of his garden
Behind his voice you can hear
the voices of children
They are playing death
They are playing drones
The way children in the French film
about World War Two
made a little cemetery where they buried
animals they had found
who had died, and the girl’s
dog who had been killed
along with her parents
She had carried the little dead dog
for miles, walking away from Paris,
Away from the bombings
After some time, to fill up their cemetery,
the children began killing:
Bugs, then birds, other animals
How to keep these children,
the children playing in the room
near where the man is speaking,
from becoming what hurts them

Day 180/181

What do you pray to? C. asked when she knew
she was dying.  I am thinking of what I answered,
fifteen years later.  Certainly nothing I expect to answer me.
What answer for the bodies lying in the road, the children
whose game is which of them falls to a missile?  What answer
for the child who walked from his burning house, the girl
who has no parents?  No siblings anymore.  No one.
What was the last thing she saw as she ran to the door?
And was it better to be the one who escaped?
I heard a man who has nothing to eat talk about his garden.
How beautiful that the roses are blooming.
What do I pray to?  A god who lets these things happen?
A god who thinks it’s all right that children
play at being killed? Whatever it is
that makes that man able to smile,
to love, to go out each day to see how his rose
is opening, opening….

Day 179

A child lies on the floor of a hospital.
She is staring up at the ceiling, listening
to the sound of so many voices, trying to find
among them one voice that is familiar.
They make a din like the buzzing of insects
on a day in summer,
a quiet day, blowing grasses, light wind.
If she closes her eyes she can almost remember
one bird she heard singing
from a  branch on a high tree under an unbroken sky. 

Day 178

A song I knew as a child on the radio, sung
by a woman whose Sephardic lullaby I sang
to Ciel the day she was born.  Lucerito de mi alma:
later she had it tattooed on her arm. The song
I heard today was about a storm, though not
necessarily a real storm. Walk on, it says,
walk on.  I am thinking of those walking
from one terrorized place to another, carrying
what they can.  Carrying their children,
too tired to walk.  Carrying the sick ones,
the old ones. When I heard the song
at fourteen I thought it was God
being sung about:  you’ll never walk alone.
They are walking past corpses.  One
stops, takes a blanket from a bag
she is holding, covers the corpse of a child.
Walks on.  Never alone. What kind of God?
Lucerito:   the child someone’s, surely.  Dreams
tossed and blown?  Someone interviewed
on the radio said the children of Gaza
have no dreams.  No dreams anymore.
What’s left to dream of?  This one
who wanted to play basketball has lost a leg.
This one who loved to draw has lost her fingers.
Walking.  Past corpses.  Past everything
fallen, crumbled.  Who walks with them? Oh cover them
so you will not see how they are being eaten
by rats.  By birds. By everything
that is hungry and still wants to live.

Day 177

Mild afternoon.  I am learning a piece by Marais.
Divide the difficult section in parts,
be aware of the ornaments, the length of bow I use.
My young dog chews on one of her toys.  The older dogs
sleep, watch out the window.  How can it be so peaceful
here, I think, that I can spend an hour 
learning these few measures?
That I can look long at the picture Barclay sends of Cristina,
leaning against a wall
in Mexico, six months pregnant, in a red knit dress?
That there are no drones, no bombs? That her wished-for,
worked-for, (already loved by all of us) child
will not be born under an exploding sky?