Day 226

The man is weeping and shouting at the surgeon.
Fix my daughter!  Why can’t you fix my daughter?
His daughter is seventeen, his only child.
A week ago his wife was killed, his brother, his nephew.
A week ago his daughter was sitting with friends
outside their tent, laughing, 
singing songs they’d listened to before.
Before. Now she lies in a bed in the single hospital,
one leg gone, infection invading her body
they do not have medicine to cure.  This is 2024,
the father is shouting.  Where are the antibiotics?
The girl closes her eyes.  It’s not the hospital corridor
she wants to see — bodies on the floor, vomit, blood —
but a place she remembers, a rock on the beach
where she used to sit, watching the waves.  Over and over,
one after the next. Before, she says to herself.
Where I was before.  Where I am going now?
She can hear the waves, they are stronger
than her father’s shouting, stronger than the surgeon’s
gentle words.  They cover the beach and recede.  
Cover.  Recede.

Day 225

Let me tell you this:  if one day
thirty, forty years from now
you find yourself talking about this time
in history, you will say that was the start,
that was the turning point. You will say
these were the ones who made it happen,
these, the reasons, these the ones
we needed to remember.  I am thinking now
of the doctor, asked why she chose to go
to do surgery where she knew she might be killed,
who said simply, This was my training, this my work.

Day 224

Don’t look too closely at these two children
stretched out on the stairs of a house
that is no longer there.  Was it theirs?
The children are lying, heads together, as though
they are telling each other something important,
Some story about a friend, some secret
about their teacher….Don’t get closer, don’t
look too carefully.  If you do
you will see that one of them
has just one eye, and the other
seems to be looking up at the sky
but isn’t breathing, can’t see the clouds
pass overhead in a slow wind, 
now and then parting to let the sun
shine on their faces.

Day 223

Tide coming in over the long coastline.  A child walks
with her mother.  It’s warm, they’re barefoot.  The water
feels good on their dusty feet.  They
have been walking a long time; it seems
to the child that they have done nothing but walk
since they left their home; but that was
the first leaving.  After that, more:  she can’t count
how many places they’ve left, 
but there was a tent, another tent…
And people who fell along the way:  a girl
she played with, whose name she never
learned, who had a doll with yellow hair,
the one thing they found when the girl was killed. 
Another girl, and that girl’s father, grandfather.
So many more. She cannot count
how many either, though
when she was in school she was good at counting.
The doll was all there was
to save.  She brushed the yellow hair
until it was clean, until the dust and dirt
were out of it. Gave the doll
a name, promised her she would take her
wherever she had to go next.

Day 222

The schools are burning.  The classrooms
are charred.  The walls
are blown out.  The chairs, the tables
are unrecognizable.  The children
who were playing, even yesterday,
on the soccer field, are not there now.
The soccer field has been bombed.
The families have moved west, the city
doth sit solitary that was full
of people…The child
sitting on the road, holding
an empty plastic bottle —
so dehydrated
he doesn’t even have tears to cry —
solitary child, his parents
somewhere under the rubble —
A woman whose children are missing
comes, takes his hand, offers him
a sip of water from a bottle she’s carrying….

Day 221

Rafah

You do not have to complete the task
But neither are you free not to undertake it….

(From the Pireki Avot)

You are not free not to undertake the task.
You are not free to shift your eyes from this scene.
There are people here who have been displaced
nine times in seven months.  They are fleeing
again, their lives have become flight and hunger,
grieving and numbering who is still here.  You
are not free not to remember.  You cannot
set this aside, look up at the sky, look out
at the sea.  There are children here
who don’t know where they lived, 
who are too small to tell us
what their parents called them.
You are not free to abandon them.  Even 
if you too are broken, if you wake
in the night and weep for everything
you have also lost, you are not free
to walk away.  

Day 220

(photograph of a mother and child)

She holds her child wrapped in a white sheet.
You can see the shape of his body
and the way her hands are holding him.
She has held him like this hundreds of times —
picking him up to take him to bed,
pulling him away from his toys, his friends,
carrying him when he fell and scraped his knees.
You can feel the weight of him in her arms
and the familiarity. Look at her eyes:
she is looking far, far.  To another place
where her child is going without her?
To a place free of bombs, of drones?
She is learning his weight, the feel of his body,
by heart, before she needs to surrender him
to the charred ground, the ruined ground.

Day 219

Someone — a neighbor — writes a name in pencil
on a wall (let’s say there is still a wall).
It’s the name of a child whose body
hasn’t been found.  She lived in that house
where now there is nothing but broken pieces.
Even the furniture can’t be identified — was this
a chair?  A window frame?  The neighbor
writes the name of the girl’s mother
under her name.  Then her father.
Then two of her brothers.  (Another brother
died earlier, on the street, on his way
to buy flour:  the family had buried him,
they knew where he lay.) There was a cat
whose name he also writes now,
under the others: a gray cat
with eyes like the sea.  He remembers the girl
calling the cat, and this, somehow, 
is almost more than the neighbor can bear.
If someone might come to this pile
of wood and concrete, the neighbor
thinks, at least they should know
who lived here.  They will see
these names. Begin to give flesh to them, voices.

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.