Day 312

You are not a number.
You are not number 39,782
of those who have been killed.
You are not number 124,486
of the 186,000 and counting
who have been starved, deprived of water,
forced to go without insulin, heart medication,
antibiotics.  You are a child
who liked to sing.  You are an elderly man
who read, took long walks, carved
wooden figures for your grandchildren.
You are a mother, a teacher, a nurse.
You are a girl who was beaten, raped
by soldiers who broke into your house
and laughed at your screams.  You
are a boy who lay in bed
dreaming of places far away.
You are someone who listened
to birdsong in the early mornings.
You are someone who loved
the fragrance of jasmine,
the way shadows of leaves
moved over the new grass
and the way you could almost watch
figs ripen on the tree in your garden
in August heat.

Day 311

We could not bury our child
because her body was scattered
everywhere, her arms and legs
falling with other arms and legs.
They asked us how much she weighed.
Ten kilos, we said.  She was young, small.
A woman came and handed us
a bag,  This bag weighs 
what your daughter weighed, 
she told us.  I’m so sorry,
she told us, it’s the best
we can do.  We have a bag
to bury instead of our daughter.
A bag that weighs what she weighed.  
We will not open it. We will not find
her laugh, her breathing in sleep,
the look on her face
when her sister played with her…

Day 310

On the other side of this wall
there’s a day, pulsing with sunlight.
An ocean stretches toward the infinite,
birds stitch the water to the infinite sky.
Sometimes we can almost see it.
On this side of the wall, relentless pounding.
A grayness that extends over everything.
A narrow space between ceiling and floor:
no way to stand, no way to sleep.
On this side, everything is dread
and horror, grief and regret.
On the other side, children are singing.
Unending, we cry to them.
Unending!  they sing to us, in tender
defiant voices.  We are unending!
We listen.  At times we can almost
begin to understand that the rhythm
of their song is the rhythm
of our own hearts beating.

Day 309

I wanted to be in that school
to study, the boy is saying:  not
to live there, not with so many
other families, so much
noise, so little food, so few
books.  I had a friend, the boy
is saying, but when the shell
exploded in the school my friend
exploded with it; I saw pieces
of flesh fly through the air
and they were his flesh.  A minute
before that, we were talking
about algebra, remembering
the teacher we had. I had wanted to be
in that school to study
but the whole school is gone now
anyway, and my friend
is gone, and I’m trying to remember
the last thing he told me,  something
about differential
equations, so strange
to be talking one minute about equations
and then suddenly not
be alive…

Day 308

A father is bouncing his two little boys
on the canvas dome of the tent
they’re living in.  The children —
toddlers — giggle, squeal.  It’s summer.
The father laughs too.  His eyes shine,
his words to the boys are full of joy.
What do they know of devastation?
For the moment, no planes.  No bombs.
He bounces his sons as though
they were on a bed, a couch, the way
children are bounced by their parents.
The children delight in it the way
children delight.  What the father
knows, what he fears, he is not
revealing.  Now and then
he looks away from them
at the sky, that, for
the moment, is only blue.

Day 307

(Hind, once again)

In the photograph
she is wearing a black graduation cap
outlined in gold.  It sits
at a little angle, as though
she had been running
just before someone took
the picture, the hat not made
to fit squarely on her small head,
her dark curls.  Her eyes shine,
she is proud (you can tell) 
to have finished kindergarten!
So proud to have learned
to read, to write her name,
other words.  When
was this taken?  In June?
Seven months before her death
by bombing in a car on a road
the ambulance couldn’t get to,
since it, too, had been bombed?
You can tell from the photograph
how bright she was.  How vibrant,
how full of mischief.  How she would use
everything she had learned, those last
hours, to try to keep herself alive.

Day 306

The children had been walking to school.
Their backpacks.  Their little jackets.
Their shoes still covered with yesterday’s dust.
The books in their backpacks they are learning
to read.  The pencils.  The colored pens.
The children were brothers.  One older, one younger.
Their mother had stood outside the tent,
waving goodbye.  They were only
walking down the road.  They were only
going to school.  The boys
were always together, their mother would say
A year apart, but almost like twins.
Even their names were similar.
Does she have to separate them now
in death?  Couldn’t they lie
in a single grave?

Day 305

I saw a girl split in two.
I saw an old man without legs.
I saw a three year old
sit watching her mother die.
I saw a shattered bird, a crushed dog,
a boy without a head.
All these things I saw with my eyes.
I saw the sun set
on a field I could not name.
I saw what had been a city
crumble and fall.  All these things
I tell you I saw — they live
within me.  They don’t
leave me alone.  They haunt 
my days. In my sleep
sometimes they come to me
and the girl is whole again 
and runs through the field, 
the old man races after her,
as though he were
young; the mother
of the little child stands,
takes her crying daughter
into her arms, whispers
I’m here, I’m here; the boy
turns his head toward them
and speaks, the dog
runs toward them, almost
dancing.  The bird soars overhead,
over the shining roofs of the city.  

Day 304

The doctor, asked why he didn’t evacuate
when the evacuation orders came,
said to the interviewer, “Do you think
I studied medicine and prepared myself
for this work for fourteen years
so I could only save my own life
and abandon the patients 
I prepared myself to serve?”  He was killed
the next day.  All those years of study —
the diseases he’d learned
to recognize, the treatments
he’d developed, the ways he’d evolved
to speak to his patients, the triumphs,
the losses, the discussions with colleagues
over this or that way of proceeding
with this or that case — all of that,
gone.  His body under the rubble.
Gone his hands, that had performed
all those surgeries.  Gone his indignation.
His devotion, his doubt, his sleeplessness. His love.

Day 303

(from a photograph)

The child is being carried out of the shelter —
that had been a school — by a young man.
A girl — maybe seven? — one arm
wrapped in a ribbon of gauze
the young man is still
holding the other end of, as though
he had been tending to her and then
had to run quickly.  Precipitously.
The arm wrapped in gauze
hangs from the girl’s
shoulder; her other arm
laid strangely across her chest, as though
she can’t move it on her own.
A blank look on her face.  Her pink
little t-shirt, her dark red
pants.  Brown socks.  I think of her
putting them on in the morning.
Someone brushing her thick curly hair.
The noise, the stench, the lines
for the toilet, lines for bread.
Who is dead now and who still living?
Is the man her father?  Her brother?
A medical worker?  A stranger?
And where is he taking her?  And what
can they do for her?