Day 283

What you saw was a place
that had been a school.
There had been people inside, not
studying — taking shelter.
Then suddenly there were parts of walls
flying through the air with parts
of bodies.  Blood, severed limbs.
A piece of a blackboard
with portions of names
written on it:  those
who had been there?  A blanket,
unaccountably intact, wrapped
around nothing.  What you
saw were lives
shattered and stopped,
like the syllables, half-
syllables of names
careening — Muh, Sor —
And what they had been saying
to one another, and what
they had been thinking, whom
they had loved — all 
coming down like cinders
to the parched ground.

Day 282

The mother whose child died
rocks back and forth on the ground.
She is holding her arms
as though she were cradling her child
but there is no child.  Her arms
hold unfathomable sorrow,
rage, horror, guilt
that she could not save him.
Memories of his laugh, his words, 
the sounds he made in his sleep.
Who could say that her arms
are empty?  Who could say
she is no longer a mother
because she no longer
has a child?  

Day 281

Where are the fields of strawberries?
Your grandfather’s orange grove?
The olive trees whose shadows
you jumped over, a game 
of trying to keep your feet 
from touching them?
Are they nothing but ash? Does the ash
grow seeds?  Can roots
find their way down
through the savaged land
to generative soil?  Once your shadow
leapt across dry summer grass.
Now you are almost as thin as it is.
You lie as still as you can
to try to keep death from touching
your shadow, sucking
your shadow into itself. You imagine
a strawberry:  sweet.  Ripe.
If you close your eyes you can almost taste it.

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.