Day 288

The woman about to give birth
lies on the floor of her tent.
Her sister is with her, and another woman
who knows about birth. The baby’s father
has been killed, the baby’s grandparents.
Her sister takes her hand when the contractions
are strongest.  None of them makes a sound.
There is only the sound of the third woman
dipping a sponge in a bucket of water,
squeezing it out, bringing it to the dry lips
of the woman about to become a mother.
Dread and happiness, terror and anticipation.
For weeks she has been praying for the baby
not to come — not here, not now —
but the process goes on, inexorable.
Like the bombs that fall
even as she breathes
through her pain, inexorable.

Day 287

You had a child who was like a bird:
delicate, quick.  When she ran
it was as though she were in the air,
flitting from branch to branch.  Her feet
barely touched the ground.  Her mind too
was swift and sensitive:  the way 
she turned her head to look at you
when she disagreed, or to let you know
she had already learned what you
were trying to tell her.
Like a bird she was in her voice, her leaning
into whoever it was she was talking with.
You stood outside the tent
and watched her go.  Like a bird,
you said without speaking it.
Later, when you knew
what had happened, you walked
toward that place and passed a bird
who had also been felled
in the same attack.  Take her
with you, you said to the bird.
Fly ahead of her. She will know
how to follow.

Day 286

Go into the ruins of this house.   See
if you can find the place
where two people sat — not
long ago — and spoke their love.
You’ll know by the way sunlight
filters in between angles of concrete.
There will be a corner you can imagine
among fallen slabs
that glows — not as you see it,
but as the glow enters your own
broken body.  What
was agonized, grieving in you
will be soothed for a moment.
What you know you will never forget
will be, for a moment,
set aside.   You will stand,
you will steady yourself,
let yourself be filled
with some memory of two
you never knew, who left
in that place their love, their
tenderness.  Whatever
became of them afterward,
that remains. 

Day 285

The beach is not a safe zone
but you can imagine it that way
for a morning.  You can watch
the tide coming in, going out,
as it has done forever, before
there were bombs, before
there were drones.  The beach
is not safe but you can run
along its edge, ankle-deep
in the water, and remember
there is something
stronger than hunger,
stronger than fear.  For 
one morning you can look out
at the horizon and remember
other days, other stories.
There, where the sky 
touches the sea, some space
can open.  See: already
the water is netted with light.
Your imagination tosses 
the glistening fish
of abundance 
into those nets
and you pull them in.
You eat, eat.

Day 284

The children could be saved
but there are no antibiotics.
No insulin, no chemo drugs.
No bandages to staunch the bleeding.
No surgical instruments.  This child
who, hours before, had been running.
This child who had been sitting
in her father’s lap, her father
telling her a story
about a girl
in some other country
climbing trees, swimming in lakes.
In some other country this child
would have had x-rays, ultrasounds.
A surgeon would have sat by her bed,
told her the steps he would take
to make certain her body healed.
She would have awakened 
in a bright room, 
her father
bending over her.  Now
the last thing he has of her
is the story he told her,
the memory of her listening.

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.