Day 208

Day’s last sunlight 
filtered through oaks, Monterey Pine.
I sit watching the dogs 
chase one another through tall grasses
in my garden.  I have spent the afternoon
with friends, remembering better times:  Mariolina and I
in Highgate Wood on the long spring evenings, 
talking about poetry, VietNam,
the forms of resistance.  Love is a form of resistance,
we said, delight is a form of resistance.  Chocolate,
dark coffee, tall deciduous trees
coming into leaf as the children raced each other
down the pathways.  If she were alive today.  If we
could walk with each other today. 
If I could talk to her now
about Gaza.  If we could weep together,
rage together. If we could emerge now, 
a braccio a braccio, out of the wood
onto Muswell Hill Road, amid loud buses,
people walking home from work, from the shops —
if we could talk now about forms of resistance,
children playing in the ruined streets, the laughter
of children —

Day 207

(For Refaat Alareer and  his family)


Stench in the streets of rotting garbage, bodies
decayed beyond recognition
I am thinking now of a field of strawberries
I am thinking of a young woman picking strawberries
with her father   She is three months pregnant
with her first child, his first grandchild.
The sun is hot, it’s August, the air saturated
with the fragrance of ripe strawberries
Their arms stained with red juice
They gather strawberries for this brother, that sister,
grandmother, friend    It seems
there is no end to the strawberries or the people
they will be given to
They walk until they’re too hot, too tired
The father takes his daughter’s hand, tenderly
wipes her arm with a cloth he takes from his pocket
Red juice, red-stained cloth   They cannot know
that in four months the father will be murdered
In six months the daughter will give birth to a baby boy
who, too, will be murdered in eight months
along with his mother, his own father
Just when the new season’s strawberries
are beginning to grow, before the child
ever knows their taste, fragrance of them
in the mild spring despite everything

Day 206

Where is the house that used to stand here?
Where are the doors, the rugs, the chairs?
The kitchen with its herbs, little pots where they grew.
There was a room with two small beds.  A mother
who sat on one of the beds reading stories 
to her children.  There was even a cat:  a gray cat
who liked to sleep with one of the children.
What can be made from all this rubble, these slabs
piled one on another?  Everything, it seems,
has been turned to stone:  a single color.
When you look you may find 
one spoon, one bracelet of beads, one pillow.
Start here, you say to yourself, and slowly
slowly you begin to build.

Day 205

I spend the afternoon with Ruby, four months old,
whose parents were my students.  Her small hands
have learned to find her mouth; her eyes, brown-rimmed
blue, scan the room, meet my eyes, focus
on them.  She is learning to be in the world, learning
face, arms, blanket, toy.  Outside
shafts of sunlight break through the oaks, we can hear
birdsong behind the sound of cars moving, trains.
I am thinking of a woman in Gaza holding her infant
to her empty breast, not knowing what else she can feed her.
I am thinking of the baby saved from the womb of her mother who died.
In the sun-filled livingroom, Ruby’s father
gives Ruby to me to hold.  She laughs — laughs! and I remember
Bobby Sands, Irish revolutionary, who said 
We will defeat them with the laughter of our children.

Day 204

The day after Caleb’s death, four year old Mabel
plays that Caleb and her dog
are playing together in heaven. I like to think of Caleb,
with his great tail, bounding again through fields
the way he did when he was young.  I am thinking
of how he might lie down with his full golden weight
beside a child who has no arms, beside a child
whose face is burned so badly no one knows who she is.
I think of Caleb and Mabel’s dog walking, one
on each side of a child whose legs have been shattered 
by shrapnel, to keep him from falling.  Can you fall
in Heaven? Can hind legs that have carried a dog
thousands of miles grow whole
and strong again?  Can a charred face
begin to heal, so a child
who has lost everything can slowly learn again
to move her lips, to call the dogs, to say
this is my name, this is what I looked like, this is who I am.

Day 203

In the morning I learn of the death by bombing
Of Refaat’s daughter and his infant grandson,
child he never met in this life.
In the afternoon I come home and find Caleb dead,
my dog who lived with me for nearly fifteen years.
Who crawled onto Ciel’s lap when he was three weeks old
and announced himself as our dog.  I am thinking of Caleb
caring for Refaat’s grandson in the other world
the way he did for years in my therapy room 
with child after child, themselves traumatized.
Caleb, Golden Retriever, who died peacefully in my kitchen
in the place he loved to lie in, afternoon sunlight
pouring through western windows. 
Refaat’s daughter and her infant son. Dead:
no such peacefulness.

Day 202

In my dream I am standing on slabs of concrete.
There are strips of curtains, 
ashes of what might have been books.
A man comes up alongside me, a young man.
He is carrying something that first
I think is simply a shroud or a blanket,
but he cradles it tenderly.  Without words
he hands it to me.  In the distance I hear
drones, warplanes.  I can hear someone crying.
Voices of children.  He hands me what he is carrying
and I am surprised at its weight.  I fold back
what covers it, see that it’s an infant.
The man now — father? uncle? — has
disappeared.  There is no one standing anywhere
near me.  Slabs of concrete.  I try to see
if the infant is dead or alive, and I 
cannot tell.  It may be breathing a little.
Its face, grayish.  Its hands, cold.  But its tiny chest
is moving, now, up and down.  What
am I going to do with it?  How can I stop its death
from taking it all the way?

Day 201

I am thinking now about the child
delivered from her mother
a moment after her mother’s death.
The mother sitting in her front room,
reading, perhaps, to her three year old, 
her husband sitting in another place
in the same room:  and then the missile,
the doctors frantically taking
the thirty-week infant from the still
body of her mother.  Never to know
the source of that voice. Never
to have that sister, that father.
The child, born of bomb and metal,
panic and the necessity of hope.

Day 200

The waves mount and break
on the shore.  Mount, crest, and break.
One day we will walk together
on the beach in Gaza.
We will sit in cafés that will be rebuilt.
We will talk of poets, of those whose words
surged, gathered force, poured
over the land like the waves
coming in continually from the sea, 
which nothing — not their bombs, 
not their viciousness, not
the snide laughter that covers their lying —
can stop.  

Day 199

My sorrow is so wide I cannot cross to the other bank.
So deep the full moon drifts back and forth
on its surface but cannot touch the silty bottom.
A baby taken by Caesarian from her dead mother.
Who will care for her?  Decaying bodies
of children in the ruins of a hospital.
Do not look for the angel of mercy; she is tending 
the unfound, the unburied. Once, in Borgo San Sepolcro,
I stood for hours in front of Pier della Francesca’s
Madonna della Misericordia:  her broad skirt
sheltering the poor, the broken.  Come now, 
whatever you are that rains mercy down upon us
like the spray that rises from a river.
Give us some coolness, some gentleness.