Day 280

Walked through the ruined city.
Saw bodies and parts of bodies
emaciated, decayed, beyond
recognition.  Some
being eaten by animals
who, themselves, were emaciated.
Saw a child bending over the corpse
of another child.  Her friend?  Her
brother?  Beyond tears, beyond words,
beyond sobbing.  Her face
as blank as the dust she knelt on.
However much longer she has
to live, — days?  years?  into
some unfathomable old age? —
this is how
she’ll remember him:
his face pocked
with bullet holes, one
eye gone from its socket.
The other staring beyond her
to a sky filled with dread
and yet some possibility
of endurance.

Day 279

The child walks by herself at the edge of the tent,
running her hand along the smooth fabric.
The tent is made from a parachute some soldier
used to land in a field near where her tent is.
The soldier is the age of her older brother.
He may have a sister like her, who loves
to run, to read, to draw.  The child tries
to imagine the soldier, guided gently down
from the sky by the parachute that shelters
her and her family.  She wants him to know
that she lost her home, that this is now
where she lives.  She wonders how many
people who lived in these tents he may have killed,
and whether he ever looked at their eyes.
She imagines her eyes are like his sister’s.

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.