Day 327

I am writing for you, Refaat.
I am trying to tell your story
as you asked us to do. It is not
the story you would have told.
It should be a different story.
It should not be the story
of all of you sleeping in the livingroom
so if you were bombed 
you would die together.
Refaat, you did not die
with your wife, your children,
your little daughter Alma
who was learning to read,
your eldest daughter
who died four months later,
her infant son dying with her.
This should never, Refaat,
have been your story
or anyone’s.  Your story should have been
about holding your grandson, watching
Alma read more and more, start to tell
her own stories.  I am trying
to tell a story I am only learning.
Day by day I learn it, day by day
I listen, listen for your voice, tell myself
I am living, these days, to tell your story
(If I must die/ you must live/
to tell my story…)
so as not to forget it, not
to abandon it.

Day 326

The children squat on the dusty ground.
They are letting insects crawl on their hands,
watching the way they move their legs, their heads.
One of them thinks, these insects are whole.
Another thinks, they have been eating, moving.
Who would wish to be an insect?  And yet,
a third child thinks, their lives, unlike ours, 
are not that different from how they were.
The children aren’t afraid
of being stung, bitten.  They know
there are wounds far worse
than those.  They put their hands
on the ground, let the insects discover
they’re free to go.  The children look
toward the remnants of houses,
the charred fields
where the insects are crawling.

Day 325

Save what can be saved.
A girl searches through the rubble of her house
to find the necklace her grandmother gave her.
Unfathomably, she finds it.  Her grandmother —
killed in a bombing — had read to her, sung
to her, cared for her after her mother
was killed in an earlier bombing.
Save what can be saved.  It’s
a simple necklace, a glass stone
on a silver chain; but the stone
is the color of the sea, the color
of the girl’s eyes and the grandmother’s
eyes, and the girl had worn it
every day, unclasped it carefully
every night so the stone
wouldn’t be lost.  And now her grandmother
is lost, and her brothers, her father.
And what she has left 
is this necklace, which she holds
this minute in her hand, stares
at it, sees the sea and her grandmother
and some survived piece of herself
in the glass stone, and slowly,
slowly amid the rubble of what
had been her life she puts her hands
behind her neck, opens the clasp.

Day 324

We say it cannot get worse and it gets worse.
We say the sky cannot grow any darker 
when it is still day, yet darkness covers it
like a shroud.  We say there are no more shrouds
to wrap the children in, we will have to use towels.
And when we use all the towels we will 
rip our clothing, tear it to ribbons, not to bury them
naked.  Not to think of them chilled
in the chilly ground.  We say the trees
are still rooted though they’ve lost
their branches.  We say the soil
still holds what they need.  We say
goodnight, goodnight, we have made it
one more day, and tomorrow 
we will tell each other the same words,
we will touch our hands to each other’s cheeks,
we will count the living and the wounded,
we will remind ourselves that the sea’s rhythms
do not change, that the songs we have sung
do not change, that the dead are not gone
but speak through us, teach us what to remember.

Day 323

Today I am thinking of Abubaker
in Deir el Balah.
His beautiful smile, his love of sports.
I am thinking of the way he spoke, only weeks ago,
about the bombs falling on the houses around his
and how, when asked if he needed to get somewhere else,
he smiled, knowing there is nowhere to go.
I am thinking of Abubaker who has not
returned Nora’s text, I am thinking of Nora
waiting, checking her phone.  I am thinking
of my friend down the block whose young dog
almost died, and my friend from childhood
whose son has a mass on his chest.  I am thinking
of the beauty of the day, and Ciel speaking of joy,
and I’m thinking of Abubaker who loves
his yellow rose, praying to whatever I pray to
that he is alive….

Day 322

Are you listening?
There are voices speaking 
from under the rubble.
Voices of bodies long disappeared,
long decayed, long rendered
unrecognizable.  Listen:
they are telling us
they are not gone.  They
still have something to say.
They are telling us that they remain.
They are voices of children singing.
They are voices of mothers
calling to their children.  Calling and calling.
They are voices of men, old men and young men.
They are sounds of animals:  dogs crooning,
cats looking for their homes.  Are you
listening?  They are calling out names
of the living.  They are asking 
something of us.  They are sad
and angry, strong and tender.  You
might say it’s only the sound
of the sea, the sound of the wind. Listen. 

Day 319

The boy’s sister so badly burned
he does not know her.  She is lying
on the floor beside him.  He
has been wrapped in bandages,
has had some kind 
of surgery, is in some
kind of pain. This that’s beside him
is not the sister he played with,
fought with, trusted with his secrets.
This column of ash, charred flesh,
this faceless voiceless expressionless block
is not his sister.  He lies still, listens
to the breathing that comes
from what lies beside him, the place
where the chest would be, amazingly, slowly
rising and falling. The familiarity of it
frightens him more than if
he didn’t know it.  He hates it, doesn’t
want it to be his sister.  He summons
whatever strength he still has,
speaks her name.  Is paralyzed now
with fear.  What if she answers?  what
if she doesn’t?

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?