Day 296

The children are playing inside the shelter
when the bombing happens.  Suddenly
everything goes dark, there is
screaming, parents
frantically searching — Call to me,
little one, let me know
you’re here.  I will come
and find you.  With
my broken hands I
will lift you, with my broken legs
I will run with you, 
with my blinded eyes,
my deafened ears:
I will see you
wherever you are,
I will hear you
however faint your cry

Day 295

(for Aseel)

What will you do, Nora asks you,
when this is over?  You say
you’ll return to your home,
your street.  You’ll clean up
the rubble.  You’ll do it
with friends, neighbors.
I can picture you now:  mops, tools
in everyone’s hands.  Everyone chatting,
singing.  The kids with music
blasting from their phones, dancing.
I can see someone bringing platters
of food, pitchers of water.  I can see
the wall of the first house standing.
Then the second.  Then the whole street
of houses, the children — the ones
too young even to remember what
it was like before — chasing each other
up the new stairs, calling to their parents
from the open windows. I can hear the parents
talking quietly to each other, sitting outdoors
in the still night after the children
have gone to bed.  I can see one woman —
you? — digging in fresh soil under the moon, alone,
planting something green and young.
Naming, as you place it tenderly
in the ground, those you have lost.  Your
cousins. Refaat. Others. Whispering
See, we are here.  We have come through.

Day 294

You send your child to the market
because he’s hungry
and you have no food for him.
Later you hear an explosion:
the market has been bombed.
You find him, after a grueling search,
at the field hospital:
alive, though he will
lose a leg.  You send your child
anywhere, knowing
he may come home
or not.  Knowing
every goodbye is a last goodbye.
And if you’d had food.  And if
you lived where there was a kitchen.
And if you could tell him 
when this will end, when
his hunger will be sated, when
what’s left of his leg
after the surgery
will stop hurting.  When
there will be medicine
to stop the pain. And if
this were an ordinary time
and you could be angry with him
for staying away too long, for
stopping to have a long game of catch
with friends, for going back
to the market and asking
for more because after
all that he was still
hungry….

Day 293

Little child born with no parents,
who will rock you?  Who
will sing to you?  Little child
delivered alive from your mother’s still womb:
no voice you remember, no arms,
no breast.  Little child, what
will you hold inside you
of the months you spent
inside her?  And your father’s
words, your brother’s laughter?
Who will nurse you?  Who
will hold out a finger for you
to grasp?  Little child, a time
will come when a song, a sigh
will remind you of something
you cannot name.  Yet
there will be those
who love you. Yet
you will carry them with you
whom, in this world,
you’ll never know.

Day 292

The doctor does not think
the boy, 15, will live.  Miraculously
he lives.  Both legs
gone, a hand terribly disfigured.
Still the boy has a smile
on his face when he
gets off the plane
to be taken to a hospital
where he will be fitted
with prosthetic legs, have surgery
for his hand.  And he is one
of thousands, tens
of thousands.  How did this one
get chosen?  Was it his smile?
Was it the doctor, who could not
stop crying when he was certain
the boy would die?  The boy
is being taught now
to walk.  He is not
going to die:  not here,
not now.  He is learning
to hold a ball in his new
hand.  To catch it.

Day 291

(for Hind)

I am listening for your voice
but it grows more and more faint.
You are a child in a car 
that has been fired at by a tank.
You are six.  Everyone in the car —
your cousin, your uncle, everyone —
has been killed.  I am not the woman
from the Red Crescent who stayed 
on the phone with you for hours,
who directed the ambulance 
to your car, who heard
when the ambulance was also
fired at.  I am not your mother,
who was briefly able to speak 
with you, who told you 
it was ok to wipe the blood
on your face with your dress,
which you were afraid of getting dirty.
I am a woman thousands of miles
away, months from that day.
I heard the Red Crescent worker
trying to keep you with her, trying
to keep you alive.  I heard your voice
over the phone growing softer, softer.
She knew by then that the ambulance
had been bombed, that the drivers
were dead.  That they would not
come for you.  I am a woman
who could have done nothing
for you, who is trying never
to forget you, who is listening
every day for your voice.  Afraid
I’ll lose you.  Afraid your voice
will be silenced within me.

Day 290

The fields are charred now where a year ago
you planted summer vegetables.  You think
of cucumbers, red and green peppers —
how you picked and ate, fresh from the earth.
The memory sustains you as you count your dead.
You tell your children stories about planting,
harvesting: you want them not to forget.
The friends, the family you lost
will not come again, but the earth will yield
vegetables.  It will fold the ashes
into itself, nourish itself on death and loss,
offer new green growth.  You tell this
to your children; you are telling it
to yourself.  You close your eyes,
imagine what may be hidden
under the soil.  Roots, probing
downward.  Fragrance
of healthy earth beneath the stench
of all that has been destroyed.

Day 289

(Refaat)

He was carrying a bag with some cans of beans,
a piece of chocolate he wanted his wife to eat
instead of giving it to the children.  Take it for yourself,
he told her, I know you are saving everything
for them. It was early winter, early darkness.
She did not know it was the last time 
she would see him.  She took the chocolate.
Warmed the beans for the children.  Ate.
I have thought every day about his poem,
the one where he said we must — all
of us — tell his story.  Their story.  Every day
I have been trying to tell it.  Every day
there is more to tell about the bombs, 
the children without arms or legs,
the starving families, the destroyed hospitals.
Every day I think about what he asked of us
and try to accept it as a gift, a
responsibility.  Something I need
to carry: Sacred.  Irrevocable.
On that day he asked his wife to accept
a gift, and she accepted it.  It was only
a few squares of chocolate he’d brought
in his bag, but she took it.  She ate it.
All the rest of her days to remember
that richness. That sweetness.

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.