Day 246

There are children on the hospital floor
and they are bleeding to death.
Small children.  Bleeding.
Yesterday they woke, put on their little t-shirts,
pink clogs with images of bunnies, ducks.
Whatever they dreamed has been drowned in blood.
A doctor bends over them, assessing
if he should use the scant gauze he has
on this child or the one beside her.  Who
has the better chance?  The one
with the name of Elsa from Frozen
on her shirt?  The one with the image of Moana
sailing her boat on rough seas, ghost
of her grandmother there to guide her?

Day 245

Look closely:  these children
are watching a soccer game.
They’re gathered in a room
with a laptop,  they’re jumping 
up and down, cheering loudly, calling out
the names of the players.  Look
carefully:  see how thin
their arms are, their faces.  The room
they are in has no
furniture, only a table
that holds the laptop.  No
windows. Look again: Can you see
how tired these children are, how hungry?
And still they are jumping:  a goal
was just scored, another!  See the joy
in their hollowed eyes.  See
their small bodies, threaded
with death and fervor.

Day 244

The child, Sara, who was burned
is dancing out of the burn unit.
The whole staff of the burn unit — somehow
this child was sent to New York — it’s
a hospital on Staten Island — is dancing
behind her.  Someone is playing music
from their phone.  They are all 
dancing:  nurses, secretaries, surgeons.
Her body is stiff, her arms
badly scarred, but she
is whole!  She is dancing!
I am thinking now of the life
she had before this.  Asking now
whether anyone — mother?
Father? Sister? — accompanied her
from Gaza to New York.  
I am thinking of what it was
that might have saved her, 
when so many others
have perished — what chance, what
stranger’s commitment, what
unaccountable love?  And what
will she do now that she is
released?  Sara who has survived.
Sara who has been returned to life.
Sara who may well have nowhere
to return to, no one
to welcome her.

Day 243

Will the rains come months from now
and press these bodies into the earth?
Mix them with dying leaves,
dying stems, roots?  Will the smell of blood,
the smell of loss, make the ground fertile,
give way to new growth?  Will flesh and memory
become soil?  Will eyes, bones, breath
become indistinguishable from the earth?
Will these boys who have lost their mother
find her again in the smell of jasmine, sweet pea flower?

Day 242

(Dana Saleh)

A friend sends me a video of a song
A young Palestinian woman
Voice clear as a stream
rippling down from the mountains
Her words precise:  Hold on
Hold on  Just a little longer
We’re going home, she sings
Child at the edge of starvation
Hold on  Mother whose three children
are dead, asleep in their tent, arms
locked around each other   Father
clutching his small son, their bodies burned
so badly they can’t
be separated, the doctor
wrapping them together
in a white sheet, tears
streaming down his face   Hold on   
The sky that is blackened now
will be sapphire and starry again  Hold on 
Stay   Stay with me   Take the next breath
Hold on  (Survival
is a form of resistance   Singing
is a form of resistance    Laughter
a form of resistance)    

Day 241

The girl says she will study medicine
when the war is over, when she is older,
to honor her brother, who died
of a disease that could have been prevented.
The boy died of imperialism.  He died
of occupation, oppression.
The virus that colonized his body
settled first in his soft organs.
Soon he could not eat, but there was no
food anyway.  Nor drink the water
that wasn’t there.  Nor take the medicines
that weren’t allowed into the hospitals
that had been destroyed.  Nor be cared for
by the doctors who had been killed. 
His sister makes her way through fallen houses.
Bodies of their friends line what used to be
their street. Among the collapsed walls
she finds the handlebar of his bicycle,
imagines it whole, like her brother, 
in the other world.

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.