Day 196

The boy is trying to brush his teeth
but his right arm is gone.  He sets the toothbrush down
with his left hand, puts the tube of toothpaste
in his mouth, squeezes it onto the brush
by clenching his teeth.  Only months ago
he was throwing a ball on a street
in front of his house.  Only months ago
his mother, father, sisters were waiting for him
to come into the house for dinner.  His friends
ran through the street, chasing the ball,
catching it.  Now I will have to do it like this
forever, he thinks.  His left hand 
holds the toothbrush, moves it steadily
across his teeth.

Day 195

Eleven children killed in a playground.
They had been living in tents, they were hungry, 
bored.  Their parents sent them to the playground
to play.  I would have done the same.
They were still alive, they had to live.
The playground was still there.
They played, ran, shouted.  Play does not live far
under the skin of children; give it space,
it comes to the surface.  Sunny
April day.  A warmth in the air.  Eleven children.
Some of them siblings.  Parents who lost two. More.
Count their bodies.  Their colorful t-shirts
with words on them, stained with blood.

Day 194

We were told our words would be enough, 
That they would unlock gates, place stone upon stone.
We believed they could make a garden.  Feed the children.
(I reach for the latch.  I switch on a lamp.  My hand
touches the rough skin of avocado, smoothness of mango.)
I hold my friend’s infant, feel how we are made
of salt and memory. How our voices strike fire.
or they are silenced.  Once I stood with a man 
in the ruins of the house
he had lived in as a child.  Some tiles remained, 
the outlines of rooms.  So tenderly he fingered
one broken tile, pressed it to his face, took in its smell,
its coolness.  Years held by that shard.

Day 193

You must live / to tell my story.  I am afraid
I am not telling this well enough – loud enough,
clearly enough.  I have been thinking all day
of the mother grinding donkey feed for her children.
The children foraging for weeds they can eat.
About what it would be to wake not knowing
if you or your children would live to see evening.
I am telling it as I hear it, and still it is not enough.
I cannot describe the stench of the air.
I cannot say what it’s like to walk through corridors of blood.
I am not there.  I am not there.  I sit here
listening, listening. A breeze from the Pacific
sifts through my garden.  My black and white cat
slips through the slats of the fence, fur
scented with the rosemary bush he has walked past
to make his way home.  I have worked, eaten, spoken with friends.
Now I am waiting for words. How is it? How to tell
what it is that is lost?

Day 192

They are burying the poets.  This one
assassinated, this one dead of cancer in prison.
They are burying the teachers.  They are burying
the doctors, the nurses, the journalists.
They are burying the geography, the history.
They are burying the memories.  They are burying
the dreams that lived inside the children, 
even those children they haven’t buried.
Reconstitute the world, Adrienne wrote. 
Didn’t they know what they buried were seeds
that will germinate underground, come up 
through the fallen concrete?

Day 191

The young man speaks of the beauty of the land.
Fields of wild grasses, hillsides descending into the sea.
The sea the color of the sea at Siracusa, 
where Mariolina and I
floated for hours one summer.   (If she were alive
we would weep together….)
The cities destroyed,
the camps destroyed, the schools and the hospitals.
Yet wildflowers still bloom in the fields, blue and yellow.
The young man is talking about the garden of a friend
who has planted, unfathomably, vegetables, 
as drones pass overhead with their deadly cargo.
If they grow, if we survive until they’re ripe, he
is saying, we’ll eat them.

Day 190

How to speak about the unspeakable.
June Jordan writing about Sabra and Shatila,
1982: I was born a Black woman but I am become Palestinian.
Now we are all Refaat, I wrote.  Thousands, millions
of Refaats.  Not the first to speak that.
The unspeakable lies on the ground
beneath the rubble.  Bombs render the houses
unlivable, but rubble is good for hiding.
Unspeakable.  Unlivable. Underneath.  
I was born a woman but not Black or Palestinian.
I do not want to be speaking of this.
I do not want to name the child whose eyes
are full of shrapnel, the woman carrying her baby
to the ruined hospital.  Revive him! Revive him! She’s shouting
But all the doctor can offer is the prayer for the dead.
The baby dead. Refaat dead.  How
many others.   We who are still
alive, what choice do we have
except to keep speaking?

Day 189

(beginning with Adrienne’s words form Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud)

… who dare claim protection for their own
amid such unprotection? The surgeon refusing
to abandon his patient, mid-surgery, when the sniper
demands he leave the hospital.  Shot in the knee,
captured, taken someplace where they torture him,
put out his eye, release him to crawl
on the filthy, corpse-strewn road. Another doctor,
asked why he does not leave when he can
to save his own life, says — not
without anger — Do you think this is why
I studied medicine for fourteen years,
to save myself and let my patients die?
I am sitting at a desk in a city ten thousand miles away.
My dogs lie on the rug beside me.  They have played
and eaten, now they are tired.  I, too, have played
and eaten.  Sometimes I think, if something happened
and we had to escape this house quickly, which one
would I take first?  Would I run back into danger
to rescue the others?  A game of privilege. 
I am thinking of those who have grown used
to the sound of bombs all night.  Who wake,
counting their children.  When I eat
I think about those who are living on grass and foul water.
And still I eat.

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.