Day 266

(from a photograph)

A father is holding his sick child
She’s being taken across the border
for treatments, one of a few
children allowed.
The child — maybe four? — is thin,
pale.  We are not told
what illness she has, only
that she will be given medicine
and that her father cannot
go with her.  What kind of medicine
to take her away from him?  And where
is her mother?  And what will comfort her
through long hospital nights, tubes
in her arms, her stomach?  
In a moment the nurses
will take her. Look at her eyes
now:  blank, as though she sees
past her father to a world of dust
where it may not seem there is
medicine to heal their pain.

Day 265

If I had not sent her to buy bread.
If I had not sent her into the street.
If I had not given her a red t-shirt.
If the air had not been cooler than the day before.
If the last bakery had been bombed before
and there was no place, no place remaining
to send her with some coins.
If we had not been hungry.  If her sisters
had not been hungry.  If I
had not been hungry.  If she had not always
been the one who chose to go out.  If her legs
had not been strong.  If she had not
always been the one who ran.  If the time
had been earlier.  If the plane
that dropped the bombs
had been flying a little to the east…. 

Day 264

In a dream you saw your sister
alive, talking about her travels.
She had been to the sea.  She
had been to the mountains.
She had learned to make
structures from wood, stone.
She showed you a house
she’d made:  a small house
she held in her hand:
rooms with tables, beds, all
she had made from twigs
from a tree she told you
had grown in the months
she’d been traveling. You woke
reaching for her, feeling
the warm, moist skin of her arm.
You smelled her smell you hadn’t
remembered for months.  You
could tell it was day from the way
light shone through your eyelids,
but you knew if you opened your eyes
she would stop talking
to you, you would rise
from the floor of that tent
sisterless, alone.

Day 263

All these months the grass
has been putting down roots
and the orange tree 
left standing when all
the other trees
in the orchard were killed
has become home
to birds.  They come, they remain.
This is our place now, they sing
in the first light
and in the last. If even one
tree is left, we will make that
our home.  And if that one
falls, we will find
another.  And another.

Day 262

A year ago Refaat was picking strawberries.
I have a picture of him:  smiling,
wearing a red shirt, holding a tray
of strawberries so ripe you can taste them
from the photograph.  Did he take them
home?  Eat a few of them
in his car?  Share them
with his daughter, who would learn
weeks later that she was pregnant?
Save some for the younger ones,
for his wife, for a student
who would drop by later
to show him a poem?  An ordinary
day.  The sun so bright
it made the smell of strawberries
so intense the car would hold it
for hours.  Refaat driving, thinking
of poetry, of walking on the beach.
Summer.  Refaat alive.  His daughter,
his yet-to-be-born grandson,
who would live
not quite three months.  The field not
burned, abundant with strawberries.

Day 261

They are rebuilding a house
where their house had fallen.
Why rebuild? It will only
be bombed again, the boy
says to his father.  The father, whose 
right arm has been injured, hangs
useless from his shoulder,
doesn’t answer, hands
the child (with
his left hand) a small
block of concrete the child
can hold, says to him Here,
put it here.  Others have come
to help. They work, silently
or talking.  Laughing
at times.  At times weeping.
It is good in the cool of early morning
to lay one piece of concrete against another,
to feel the vigor of hands, legs. 
The child sets down the block
where his father is pointing.  Sees
that it balances.  Begins to understand how
it will make the corner of a room.

Day 260

Smell of decay.  The dust, the canvas
walls of the tents, this hospital floor.
What did they do to you
when you were tortured? one surgeon
asks his friend. They are sitting
in the crowded corridor
in bloody scubs, not
having others.  The one
who had been tortured
hangs his head, shakes it slowly.
Too unbearable to tell, he says
to the bloodstained linoleum,
but it sounds like nothing, like the sound
of roots plunging downward, the loneliness
at the sea’s bottom, broken fingers
grasping at light.  This day
they have treated sixty, seventy
children, most of whom died, many
of whom may die in days,
weeks.  Once, the surgeon
who was tortured
tells his friend, jasmine
grew along these roads.
It pervaded the air. He raises
his eyes, looks down the corridor
of death.  Tries for a second
to remember the voices
of children playing.  How
did you survive? the other
asks, though no one now
could define survival.

Day 259

Forgive me, the mother is saying to her child.
Forgive me, I was not able to come to you.
All the days of your life, when you called me I came.
The sun was hot today, the air fetid.  I know
you would have been walking with me.
I know we would have been talking
about the sea, about birds
flying over the sea.
Forgive me, for I could not save you.  Forgive me,
my hands were not strong enough to save you
from the death that came for you.  A mother goes searching
for food, comes home to find her child dead.  What
were the words you cried out as the house
turned dark, collapsed around you? Were you stunned
to silence?  Did you call
my name?  

Day 258

Abubaker saw a boy with no shoes.  No home,
no food, no family.  He could give the boy
a little food, though nothing else; so
that’s what he did. The boy ate, sitting
in the dust.  Since he had no
fork he ate with his hands, and when
he was finished eating he gave Abubaker
the dish without cleaning it, since
there was no water.  When
was the last time you saw
your family, Abubaker asks the boy,
but the boy shakes his head,
doesn’t know the answer, can’t say
what year this is or what month.

Day 257

(from a photograph)

Look at these little girls sitting in a tent.
They look like any girls anywhere.
They’re wearing t-shirts, jeans.  They are sitting upright,
clearly paying attention
to what a teacher is telling them.
Books are open in front of them.  No matter
that it’s a tent and not a classroom.  No matter
there aren’t chairs, tables.  They have made this tent
into a place of learning.  (The teacher is telling them
about fractions:  half this times three-quarters that.
This percent of illness times this percent starvation.
This percent childhood times this percent grief.)
They are writing carefully in their little notebooks.
The tent shakes now and then as bombs explode near them.