Day 278

(1)

The living stand like stones
in a barren field.  The shadows
of stones reach across
the field, merge, darken
the grasses.  We will not
be cut down, they say.
Our blood will nourish
this soil. You will see
what abundance will grow
from it….

(2)

I saw a man
holding the body of his dead child,
kissing the child’s face, her hands,
as though trying to wake her, as though
trying to send his love far, far
into the other world.  Each kiss
for a year he would be without her.
Ten, thirteen, eighteen.  Whoever
she would have been, she will remain
this eight year old with hair
to her shoulders and burnt
legs, a wound to her stomach
that bleeds, bleeds, into her father’s
chest as he holds
her. What she was
in now an empty sleeve, and soon 
her father will be filled 
with his child’s blood, 
he will walk through this world
carrying her, carrying her.

Day 277

If you hide in a mosque, they
will find you.  If you hide
in a basement room, huddling
with your children.  If you hide
in a collapsed building.  If you hide
under two stones that make
a cave.  They will find you
and you will try to run.  They
will pursue you with whatever
they have — iron bars, baseball
bats.  You must tell your children
goodbye three times each day:
when they wake in the morning,
when you go out to find
anything for them to eat,
and when the first stars
appear in the night sky
and sleep draws them in.
Goodbye goodbye goodbye, 
as darkness falls one more time
and you wait to see if
this is the last.

Day 276

I want to send you this day —
the tall trees, the fragrant air,
the river webbed with light —
you who are, unfathomably,
still alive.  You who — nine times
in nine months — have been
displaced.  I want to give you
the sound of the current, the small
leaves stirred by a breeze.  I want
you to know, even
in a dream, this sweetness:  you
who, as I write, are sleeping in some
makeshift tent, half wishing
for death to take your children
so they won’t keep crying
from fear, from hunger.

Day 275

(Gaza City)

Do you think nothing remains of these lives?
Here was the university.  Here
was a room where students talked
about poetry, where someone once
was so moved by a phrase, a line,
that she went home and started writing.
Do you think her writing will not be read?
Here was a café where people came
every morning.  Here was a playground,
a tree-lined street where children
walked in twos, threes, on their way
to school.  Here was a window, a door,
where a mother stood and said goodbye
to her son, whom she never would see again.
Here was the bed he slept in, here
the drawers where he kept his clothes.
Do you think he is forgotten?
Someone told me today
that as soon as the bombing of the hospital
stopped, the doctors
took what rags they could find
and began cleaning, cleaning.  
All night, many nights,
the doctors cleaned. Do you think
they wouldn’t do it again?  Do you think
they won’t find whatever there is
to take in their shattered hands,
begin wiping away the blood,
the torn pieces of flesh?

Day 274

You walked home and saw bodies
severed from themselves, parts
of shattered bodies on the bare ground.
You’d gone out to buy bread 
for your child
and came home to find he had
no mouth.  No face. I am not writing
a litany of horrors, a catalogue
of images intended to shock.
I am talking about a morning.
I am talking about a place
that had been like other places:  
houses, roads, playgrounds.
I am talking about what you did
that morning, when your child
was hungry.  When you promised him
bread. You to whom I am speaking
know these things are not
imagined.  You whose days
move from anguish to anguish.  You
who wrapped your child in a shroud
with the bread you brought him,
the bread he asked you for.

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.