Day 218

The children are wearing their new school uniforms.
It’s been months since they went to school.
One wants to learn more Arabic. 
Another wants to learn how to read,
A third says science is the most important subject.
What they have learned is how long it takes
from the time you hear the plane until the time the bombs fall.
From the last time you ate til the next.  

Day 217

Imagine a woman sitting in a tent
trying to nurse a newborn, the infant
crying a small, faint cry, more like a cat’s cry,
barely moving his thin stiff arms, small mouth
grasping the nipple, the mother herself
thin, tired, the milk barely coming.
Imagine this woman watching
her other children as they run in and out
of the tent.  They too are hungry.  She is thinking
now (as the baby suckles, pulls away, latches on
again, then resigns himself
to the absence of milk) about the garden
they used to have.  Mint,
oregano.  Spinach, lettuces and parsley.
She is thinking of long afternoons watching the sun
move from one corner of the garden to another.
The baby is sleeping now.  His head tilts back.
She puts two fingers on his tiny chest 
to make sure he is breathing.

Day 216

A child who is thin and cannot breathe.
A child who has lost both his legs.
A child whose family died but she is alive.
I am making a catalogue of broken children.
I am thinking of the boy I knew, who laid dolls
one beside another in my sand tray, covered them
with my shawl. The dolls were dead.
He did not talk about his missing leg.
He spoke of his infant sister, his grandmother.
It was spring; we went outside, into the garden.
We smelled the purple hyacinths. It was hard for him to bend
with his prosthetic leg; he hadn’t learned yet.
More purple than any flower he had ever seen.
He wanted to know the names of all the flowers.
I asked what his sisters’ names had been.

Day 215

Older children are dancing for the smaller children.
Their hands at their waists, they turn their heads,
kick their feet, smile.  Who knows what will happen
later?  Who knows which one has lost
a parent, a brother?  The smaller children sit,
their arms around each other’s shoulders.
Now and then they laugh a little.  The sun
shines, the breeze from the sea chases away
the smells of rotting.  If you didn’t know
you might think it was a normal dance.  A normal day.

Day 214

(the Rafah invasion)

Now where do we go?  The woman living in this tent
is about to give birth to her first child. 
Everything she sees
is dust and rubble, broken pieces of lives.
The child inside her moves.  
Here is an elbow, here a foot.
The stench of death is all around, 
but at moments the breeze
still carries a fragrance of jasmine. 
At night she speaks
to the child, who doesn’t know yet
that we are made of beauty and peril.

Day 213

We are waiting.
We are waiting for the child to be born.
We are waiting for the bombs to fall on our tent.
We are waiting for the first light of morning.
We are waiting for trucks to come, carrying food.
We are waiting for food to be unpacked from the trucks.
We are waiting for snipers on the ground to shoot their first shots.
We are waiting for the air to warm up.
We are waiting for the air to cool down.
We are waiting for the child.  We are waiting
for the child to cry his first cry.   We are waiting
for the child to stop crying.  We are waiting
for the wound to heal.  We are waiting
for the parents to name their child.
We are waiting for the grandmother to claim him.
We are waiting for help to come
from beyond the borders.  We are waiting 
for the borders to open.   We are waiting
for next month, next year.  We are waiting
for the sound of children’s voices
to come again from the parks, the schoolyards.
We are waiting for the last light of day.
We are waiting for the first star, the star
that is seen from here and from anywhere.

Day 212

No end to the ruins.  I sit with friends
I have known a long time, talking about Rafah.
No end to the threat of invasion,
the famine, the rotted food, the poisonous water.
Someone today said if the houses were rebuilt
at the rate houses have been rebuilt before,
it would take forty years.  A child
in second grade, provided
that child lived to grow up, would be
middle-aged before the streets were filled
again with houses, shops, gardens.  My friends and I
sit in a café on a quiet street in Berkeley.
People walk by, a boy on a scooter
weaves his way over the sidewalk.
If he’s lucky, his future will look
something like this.  Something he can imagine.

Day 211

A surgeon speaks of a boy, eleven,
who lost his right leg.  In another time
there would have been ways of saving it;
now there are not.  The boy asks, If they
find, maybe twenty-five years from now,
a way to re-attach amputated legs, can you
save my leg somewhere so I can come 
get it?  Or maybe, he says, they’ll find
a way to grow a new leg, some medicine
they can give you to start it growing.
The boy is thinking of who he’ll be
at thirty-six.  The genocide over, the houses rebuilt.
Gardens and olive groves thriving 
in a gentle breeze that blows from the sea.
His family whole, his body whole,
he races across the sand, plunges
into the water.  The sun shines
in a clear sky.  There are no
helicopters, no drones, no warplanes.

Day 210

In the long afternoon, two sisters
are looking for birds.  This happens
while bombs fall on their neighborhood.
One still has her binoculars, the other
carries a small, worn notebook.
They have done this for years:
scouted for birds, named them,
documented time, place, season.
Do birds still fly when the air
is filled with warplanes?
What do they do when the trees
they nested in have been destroyed?
How do they find their way
from places where life
is as it was, to this ravaged land
with no familiar markers? Two birds cross,
dividing blue from blue.  If the sisters don’t look
straight ahead at the fallen city, 
they can almost pretend the birds
will lead their way home.

Day 209

The brothers go from Rafah to Khan Younis
to find their house.  It was the most beautiful city
in the world, their sister is saying.  They go
to the street where their house had been, but there is
no house, no street, nothing.  The brothers search among stones.
Everything is stone, and under every stone
more stones.  How is it that our lives
are reduced to stones?  Our books, our musical instruments —
how have they turned to stone?  Are the children
who played on this street also stone?  And we
who are moving, breathing, searching — do we not know
that we too might become stones leaning on stones?