Day 318

Improbably, the woman conceived
after years of trying IVF, desperate 
to have a child.  Improbably, she
conceived:  quadruplets, all carried
to term, all healthy.  The reporter
does not tell us how old
they were, how many boy or girls.
All she says is that they were killed,
and their mother with them.  She is
speaking with the grandfather,
who can barely speak.  All those
years, he keeps saying, trying
to have a child.  And then four!
I am imagining her happiness, the happiness
of everyone who knew her.  I 
am imagining the four children
closer to each other than to anyone else.
I am hoping they died
at the same moment, in the same
bombing, the air utterly blackened, no one —
not the children, not their mother —
having to see the others dead.  I
am listening to the grandfather,
who has lost everything. The years
of hope and loss, the waiting,
the not knowing.  The improbable
joy.  To lose them
like this, the grandfather
is saying; and he cannot finish.
What words could there be? Everything
it took to bring them into this world…

Day 317

I cannot forget the picture of this child
on the floor of the hospital,
her legs bare, no muscle, just skin
stretched over bone.  You can see
one of her arms, skeletal as well.
I cannot forget her, cannot stop thinking
how she must have grown thinner
day after day:  at first, perhaps, imperceptibly.
Then this.  I want to think she remembers
running, playing, eating.  I want to think
someone will find a way to feed her.
I want to think that slowly, slowly,
she will return to herself.  Her legs
will carry her.  Her arms 
will be able to lift a ball, a book, a glass.
I want to think she is still alive:  that
most of all.  That something deep
inside her could be enough
to nourish her.  That the picture I saw
was not the last picture taken of her.

Day 314

I am listening for what you have to tell me.
Refaat, I am one of many
trying to tell the rest of your story.
Of all those killed in the massacre, not a single one
identifiable.  Bodies torn, shattered.
Must I say that the fields
of devastation lie endlessly
before us?  The already-starving step over
pieces of corpses, searching
for anything: was this my son,
my wife, my mother?  This hand, do I
know it, shredded as it is?
What will I bury?  I am thinking now
of Akhmatova: on the line 
outside the Leningrad Prison, asked
by a woman whose lips
were blue with cold, “Could one
ever describe this?”
And the poet,
anguished as she was, said to her “I can.”
And wrote — over
the next thirty years —
her great poem, her Requiem.
No foreign sky protected me
No stranger’s wing shielded my face…
Is that what I’m writing? I ask you.
A requiem?

Day 313

The faces of the newborn twins
wrapped carefully in their swaddling blankets
Their eyes bright, their skin healthy —
How did their mother
nourish herself, how did she manage
to bear such vibrant infants —
who lived four days in this world
before a bomb took them —
and their mother and grandmother —
back to the darkness they had emerged from.
Four days.  Four mornings and nights.
Four times hunger thirst hunger.
Skin on skin.  Loneliness.  Warmth.
Four days to taste the milk of this world.
Four days to see sun, sky.  To learn
everything they could learn
about breathing.  About being held.
I grieve who they would have been.
I grieve the things they would have done.
I grieve their father, still living, who for four days
held joy in his hands that eased,
somewhat, the dread of what
he knew could happen.

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.