Day 240

Where can they play
now that everything they knew is gone?
The field where they threw balls back and forth.
The garden where they chased each other.
The small corner of the room
where their sister rocked her doll.
The sunlight today taunts them,
the warmth of late spring.
Once there were quiet mornings.
Once the days unfolded, hour by hour,
in a rhythm they could trust.

Day 239

Hard to remember that the moon 
is the same moon that hung in the sky
hours ago over Gaza,
that a woman there might have looked up
as I did just now, not thinking
to see it, search for it, and been surprised,
as I was, at its sharpness, its brightness.
What kind of day did she live
before the moon found her
in that way?  Did she gather weeds
to make some kind of soup
for her children?  With what
water?  Did she wrap her children
in her own clothing, to keep them warm
through the night?  Did the hours bring news
of someone she loved who was killed?
Did she sweep the thin floor of her tent
with a broom she’d made from scraps
of paper, because keeping out dust
is something she could do, and do it again?

Day 238

The children made up a game with pieces of cloth.
The cloth came from tents that had been burned.
The edges were singed: whatever colors
they had been, now they were turned to brown.
The children distributed the pieces, so many for each.
They made rules: how to get more, how
to win a piece of cloth from another child.
The cloth was torn, each a different shape.
Some had come from curtains, some from clothes,
some from tablecloths, towels.
Each had been a piece of a life
and the children knew that while they played.
Meanwhile there were explosions.  Meanwhile,
not far from where they were, people
were being bombed.  Fires broke out;
they could see smoke rising into the sky.
All this was at some distance from where
they kept playing their game.  One child
started crying because he had lost
all his pieces of cloth.  His mother
too had died, his grandmother
and three of his sisters.  His friend,
sitting cross-legged next to him
on the dusty ground, silently counted
his own cloth, gave him
half the pieces.

Day 237

There was a life that happened here.
People dancing, people sitting close together
so the camera could get them all into the picture:
A celebration of some sort, women
with their arms around each other’s waists.
Children sitting cross-legged on the floor.
There was music, food.  Spices
that grew in pots outside the windows.
People rose in the morning, walked to shops
to buy bread, fruit.  Their days were ordinary,
unremarkable.  They ate, talked, argued,
read a few pages before shutting the lights.
Their children slept; sometimes their feet 
slipped out of the blankets.
There were photographs we found of all
these things.  You can hold them up,
turn them, study them,
superimpose them on the ruins.  Number
the dead and the living. 
The unfound, the unburied. 

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?

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.

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….

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.

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?

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.