Day 230

I want to tell you about the girl, maybe three years old,
running from the hospital with her mother.
Her mother running more slowly because
she is carrying a baby with a bandage around its head.
The girl is holding a large jar of baby formula
though there is no water to mix it with.  And someone
is asking her where they are running, and she answers,
tears in her voice, I don’t know.  And someone
is asking what will you do now and she answers
I don’t know.  And where her father is she doesn’t
know, and whether her house will be rebuilt,
whether her grandmother is alive, whether
the bombing will stop for more than this hour
when others, as well, are fleeing the hospital.

Day 229

I am thinking about the man whose legs 
were burned, so burned he barely had skin.
He was made to kneel on the floor for fifty days,
hands behind his back, no pain relief, no medical care.
How could it be possible? I am thinking
of what it might have been
that sustained him, kept him alive, 
that staved off infection, sepsis, gangrene.
Fifty days he knelt, stared straight ahead,
listened to sounds outside.  Did he have children?
Was he thinking of them?  Was he thinking
of friends he loved, music, a street he knew?
Did he count each daybreak, tell himself
survival itself is a form of resistance? 

Day 228

I have nothing to lay on this grave
that is not a grave, but a photograph
of a pile of concrete.  I have
no flowers, no words of comfort.
I don’t know how you died, nor where, nor
in what places you were before this happened.
I cannot pray for you; I don’t know what
you might have wanted me to ask for, to praise
or thank or lament.  I don’t know
if you were old or young, infant or child.
Did you love?  Did you trade your life
for a bag of flour, a bucket of saline water?
Was there a bird, an insect on a stem of grass you saw
before the bomb or bullet blackened your sight?
Whoever you are, I mourn you.  I bring you
these words from my helplessness, my anguish.
When I walk down my street I will 
remember you of whom I know
nothing except you lived. I will carry you
with me, I who have nothing else to offer.

Day 227

How the streets are deserted that were full of people.
How the universities are destroyed, the hospitals gutted.
A solitary dog steps over slabs of concrete, looking
for something to eat, finding nothing.  All I want,
the young man is saying, is to return to studying.
His mother sits in the small room beside him.
She is rocking back and forth.  She does not know
how she will protect him, how
she will protect anything.  Day breaks
with its late spring promise of heat and sunlight.

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.