Day 330

For years the sisters lay together in one bed,
whispering to each other when the lights were out,
telling secrets, planning their days.
For years they brushed each other’s hair, walked
together to school, wore each other’s clothes.
Now only one of them is alive.  Now the living sister
reaches in the night and finds only empty space.
Now she talks silently to herself
so as not to disturb the others in the shelter,
one shelter, then another and another.  Now
there is no school to walk to, no tangled hair
of her sister’s to brush.  She is 
half a clip, half a lid, half a scissor.
A broken branch with the leaves blown away,
a single shoe.  She lies in the dark
counting things that have missing parts.
She writes her name and erases half of it.

Day 329

The feel of skin, soft skin, your infant sister’s skin.
The smoothness of petals.  The roughness
of sand.  The cold shock of the sea
after months of winter.  Do you fall asleep
counting these things?  Do you dream,
sometimes, that this horror has ended,
that you are walking on a street
with houses, gardens, red and yellow roses
making the air fragrant (the air no longer filled
with the stench of everything rotting)?  Do you reach
for those you loved who are no longer there
and feel, sometimes, that you touch them?
Can you tell yourself that you breathe 
for them, you sing for them, you walk
for them?  Oh child: we are made
of stars and sea and sand, forest and desert.
We are made of one another, our cells
interwoven, our blood intermixed. Can you
take solace in this, does it ring
anything but hollow for you?

Day 328

Two brothers killed for no reason
except they were walking together
on a dusty road on a hot afternoon.
One had grown probably as tall
as he was going to grow, or nearly;
the other was younger; his parents
will never know how tall
he would have been.
I am thinking about the morning
of that day:  the way everyone there
knows any day could be
their last — any hour, any minute.
Yet the boys woke, dressed, went
together to wherever they went
to do whatever they did:
a makeshift school?  a soccer game?
And never returned.  What was returned
to their parents wasn’t even
bodies:  parts of bodies.
How understand that?  How to imagine
their last conversation, the one
they must have been in the middle of
when the bomb struck.

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?