Day 273

What can I promise you, child
born in a tent in Rafah
at the end of June, 2024?  Your mother
is crying: her milk is thin.  There is
no medicine for her pain.  No
medicine that can insure
that you will breathe until nightfall
and wake to breathe again
tomorrow.  You who are born
of dreams and horror.  You whose skin
is still soft from the womb.
You who shelter resistance
in your house of bone.  You
who look up at the stars
for the first time and see
the gone generations,
those whose love you bring
into these corridors of devastation.

Day 272

(from a photograph)

The child’s small bare feet
stick out of the blue towel
his father has wrapped him in
to bring him to the hospital.
Bloodstains on the towel where
the child’s head and stomach are:
but the feet are whole:  perfect toes,
brown pants ending just at the ankles.
The father’s head is thrown back
in anguish.  He holds his child.
A doctor has his hands 
on the father’s shoulders,
but there is no comfort, nothing
to staunch this pain.
And I have no words for this
except what I’ve
described here.  Gone
the child’s hunger.  Gone
the child’s fear.  Gone
his voice, his laughter.
Gone the look on his face
as he fell asleep.  Gone 
the sound of his walking,
the warm tight grasp 
of his little fingers.

Day 271

Do they think they have destroyed us?
They have not destroyed us.
We are sitting with friends
watching a soccer match
on the one charged laptop.
We are inventing a game with stones,
torn pieces of curtains, broken
glass:  with what has been
bombed, ripped open, blown
upside down.  We are jumping
from one fallen slab of concrete
to another:  this
was from your house, this
was from mine.  We are scattering
seeds from seed pods
on the dusty earth
and waiting to see what grows.
We are counting the hours,
the days, until we can know
what fruit or flower they will bear.

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.