photo by Ali Hamad/APA

When the genocide began I started writing daily notes. The notes, many of them handwritten in various notebooks,  were disconnected lines, images, stories I’d read or heard. Some of them evolved into poems, included in this collection; but it wasn’t until Day 167 that — having heard about a mother who was able to save one of her children but not the others, and a doctor who was saving the amputated limbs of wounded children, putting the limbs into boxes labeled with their names —  I felt the urgency to document these tragedies in a whole poem every day, and that is what I will do until the genocide ends.
I intend to keep writing until the ceasefire is permanent — until Palestine is free.

Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

Day 236

One airstrike followed closely
by another
  And then it was clear
that what they smelled, maybe
thirty minutes later, were bodies
burning.  Bodies that just before
had been sleeping, sitting, talking.
Bodies that ached.  Bodies
that hungered.  The envelope of flesh
torn, charred, sizzling.  Nothing to hold
the tender organs, nothing
to shield, to enclose.
How without skin will they look
for surcease of pain?  How
without skin will those
who are standing dig
(with what fingers?) to find
the buried ones, whose cries
are silenced now by the sound
of everything burning?

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

Day 235

I sit here
in late afternoon, light
filtered through leaves of my plum tree,
my apple tree. If I could speak
with you, who are walking
at this same moment
through burnt ruins
of the bombed-out
tent camp, searching for anything,
anyone alive — You, boy, 
who may be fifteen
or sixteen, who in some other life
would be out with friends, laughing,
joking — If I could take
your hand and lead you 
from the horror you are walking through —
your eyes blank, your face 
hollow — you, who were (not
long ago) someone’s
child. You, who have become
wraith, nightwalker, empty pod.

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

Day 234

Forty-five killed in tents in Rafah.  Tents
pieced together from torn clothing,
plastic bags, anything they could find.
Tents that had swayed gently in the occasional breeze.
Tents that had almost begun to feel like home.
(Child who lay between her parents in the night
marked by the endless sound of drones, still
hearing their breathing.  Walls
of the tent opaque, but she watched the first
morning light bring the colors back:  orange,
green, yellow.)  Now there is nothing
but blood, flesh ravaged and strewn
in the dust.  No breath no
cloth no voice no colors.  How almost cruel
this daylight feels, sweeping the ground….

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

Day 233

I am thinking
of Abubaker’s yellow rose,
wondering if it’s still blooming, if others
have opened around it, if its fragrance
is stronger than the stench of death.
I am thinking of what grows
in soil fertilized by corpses.  I am thinking
of everything buried under everything
that has fallen, of mothers
finding an arm, a leg
of their child, identifying it
by how it’s clothed: the last
shoe, the last color, the last
zip of the zipper, buttoning of the button.
The last slipping on of the t-shirt 
over the small head, the instant 
of darkness and then more
darkness.  I am thinking about walking
today with Joanna, still sturdy
at 95. How
we came to a garden abundant
with yellow roses.  How I told her
about Abubaker as we 
leaned into the rosebush, breathed
deeply, saying whatever came close
to a blessing on his survival,
and on yellow, on softness
of petal, steadfastness
of seed, root, stem.

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

Day 232

A mother carrying her infant
stops to help a wounded child
stand, who had fallen.  The child
takes her hand.  He doesn’t know
his name or where his family is.
His arm is bleeding.  The woman
wipes it with her skirt.  They are walking
past rubble.  They are walking past
broken thoughts, past fragments of memory.
Drones cross the sky.  The woman
is thinking of birds:  how,
when they migrate, they have certain markers
they use to guide themselves:  a
particular tree, a hill, even
a building.  There are no
more markers,
she thinks, holds
the child’s hand more tightly. Her infant
is softly crying now, and the child
starts crying as well.  The woman wonders
what she will do to try to find
his family, and what
she will name him if she
doesn’t.  The sound of drones
doesn’t stop. She looks
in the sky, sees four, five, maybe six
birds flying.  How, she is
thinking now, will they
find their way?

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

Day 231

Tell the stories.  The man lying on the guerney 
asks the surgeon, Will you tell our stories?
Do not forget us.  Do not abandon us.  The surgeon
has just come from operating on a child
whose legs, he knows, he should have amputated
above the knee, but couldn’t bring himself
to do it.  He has done all he could.  He saved
the child’s knees.  Knees that were, before
the surgery, still dusty from playing.
The child was playing in the dust before his legs
were blown up.  Tell
the stories.  Tell them.  Do not
shy away from them.  Do not flinch.
Do not ask,  Do I make you uncomfortable
with these stories?
  The man lying on the guerney
has lost wife, parents, children.  House,
work.  He looks 
at the surgeon, who nods to his question.
Thank you, the man says, smiling.

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

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.

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

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? 

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

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.

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

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.

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