Day 270

How can we find the parents
of this child?  Alone, empty-eyed,
she sits on the ground.  She’s maybe
two and a half, maybe three.
Her t-shirt is stained with blood:
a sibling’s?  her mother’s? someone’s
she didn’t know?  She does not seem
wounded in her body, but
she doesn’t speak. There may be
no words, no words for what
she has seen. No one
has washed her.  No one
has cleaned her shirt, her feet.
Will she scream if anyone
tries to touch her?  She sits there
not moving, not crying, picking up
handfuls of dust, opening
her hands, letting the dust fall
back onto the ground.

Day 269

Where there is nothing they are making a school.
They are teaching children with books
they are making themselves:  sheaves of paper,
words written by hand.  They are writing
stories to teach the children to read.  The children
sit in a circle.  They sing.  They are given
pencils, they write.  They draw.
One, who cannot remember
the name of his street, and whose parents —
who would have told him — were killed
when the street was bombed — writes the name
of a boy who has become his friend, Mahmoud.
I live on Mahmoud Street, he writes, smiling.
He draws houses, gardens.  A girl
on a bicycle, passing by.  A man and a woman
on the steps of the house he circles, writing
My house.  They are holding the hands of a boy,
one on each side.  Nothing is broken
on Mahmoud Street. The sun
in the left-hand corner of the page
is shining, shining. 

Day 268

The ambulance was bombed
that might have saved the boy Hammoud.
His friend talks about how they’d played
together every day
since they were small:  first
with metal cars, then soccer.
Hammoud who was killed played soccer
even in the rain, even in the cold.
He liked to say he was afraid
of nothing.  His friend
breaks down, talking
about Hammoud, wonders
what fear might have entered
through the fractured bones,
the blinded eyes.  What fear,
waiting for the ambulance
that never came.  The inner light
dimming slowly.  Slowly.
Then all at once.

Day 267

The child is reciting an alphabet of loss:
her father her brother her uncle
another uncle her cat her baby sister
two cousins three cousins six
She names them, counts them
Makes a little line on a scrap of paper
for each one
Her cousin she played dolls with:  a line
Her uncle who taught her
how to read:  a line
Her father, who only days ago
carried her on his shoulders
Some of them are not
even buried, not even found
from under the rubble
But there they are on the page: lines
And she will save the paper, she says
to the girl squatting beside her
in the dust, so she can add
more lines when she needs to

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.