Day 344

The sky is a tent that covers me,
The broken streets are my friends.
The fields are my neighbors; they wait
for me in the morning when sunlight
awakens them.  Will the charred
fruit trees nourish me?  Will the sea
offer itself as my confessor?
I will tell my story to the tides
and they will bear it away.  I will speak
to the dust of the griefs
crushed into it; my feet, bare
as they are, touch
a multitude of losses
wherever I walk. 

Day 343

Four in the morning in Gaza.
Early autumn moon, the same moon
over everywhere.  Those who remain
(in the tents that remain
pitched in the sand) lie wakeful, vigilant,
stare through the flaps in their tents
at the clear sky, moon lighting
their weary faces, their broken thoughts.
Just days ago the bombs made craters
in the sand, tents melted
from that heat, bodies
shattered, unrecognizable.
Just days ago the moon was climbing
over the sea, less of it visible
than now, its pleated light 
spilling over the water.  How clear
the sky is in this fleeting moment
without bombs, how strangely solacing
the vastness between stars,
the distances from our world.

Day 342

What did we do wrong, the boy
asks his mother?  Why are we here?
He is trying to understand the losses,
the bombings, the hunger.  How do we tell
the child that cruelty is random, 
that brutality cannot be understood,
that there is no reason?  So difficult,
when you offer him one spoonful
of rice and his sister, one; when
you bandage his bleeding hand
and his friend’s bleeding foot,
when you hold him all night
because he cannot stop crying.
What he has learned from you
is tenderness, fairness; how
talk to him now about hearts
where there is none? 

Day 341

The child would have started school
today.  He would have walked
with his little satchel of notebooks,
taken his seat among his friends,
listened to his teacher, sounded out
the words, come home and shown
his mother, his older sister,
how well he was learning to read.
Instead he sits in a tent
listening to drones, bombs,
cries.  These have become
for him an alphabet: this sound
means those tents, those families
have been hit.  That sound
means another sound will come
within minutes, and who
is it coming for?  The child
stares up at the blackened
sky, reads it as though
he were reading a story.

Day 340

An old man rocks back and forth.
He is sitting on what were
the steps to his house,
the house he lived in as a boy,
the house where his children lived,
the house where, years ago, his wife died.
He sits, his hand on his gray cat
who, unfathomably, has survived
the bombing his grown sons
and grandchildren did not.
The cat looks at him, understands
the man has no words for her,
that he needs her, that he 
will do what he can to find
food for her, a place
for both of them to sleep.

Day 339

Another child dies of starvation.
Her body has eaten itself: first
the muscles, then the inner organs.
Her body has been eaten by cruelty,
by disregard.  By foul water,
fetid air, ravaged soil, spoiled meat,
moldy vegetables. Her body
that was four years into this world —
her body that walked, ran, played,
laughed, held and was held —
her body has faded, dissolved, retreated
into darkness, blankness, emptiness.
Her small body has been sucked into nothing.
Nothing is her body now.  Her body of nothing.
Her name of nothing.  Her voice of nothing.
Her mother’s arms cradling nothing.
Her father’s breath warming nothing.
Her sister’s arm, stretched around her
through so many nights, is stretched
around nothing. 

Day 338

A woman is cleaning her house
with its fallen walls, its shattered windows.
Somehow she has found a mop, a broom, 
a bucket of water that had been used
to clean something else.  This
is still our home, she says
to her children, this is 
what we have.  The two children
sit cross-legged on a concrete slab
that had once divided indoors from outdoors,
sweetness from terror.
Their mother hands each child
a rag.  Wipe whatever you see,
she tells them; this
belongs to us.  As long as it’s here,
as long as we’re here — minutes?
hours? years? — it belongs to us.

Day 337

In the street filled with sewage,
children are taking showers in the rain.  
They take off their shirts, run their fingers
through each other’s hair.
You can hear their laughter.
How we want to be washed clean, I
think. How we long to step out
into our lives over and over
as though we could make ourselves freshly,
as though we could begin again
whatever we need to begin.
The rain is always new; the same rain
has never fallen before
on this ruined ground, on these streets
filled with rot, with pus,
with the stench of loss.
When the children
open their mouths, they catch
raindrops that fall
from elsewhere, that have not
been absorbed yet into this horror.

Day 336

Which of us can know
whether this day will be our last?
The eight year old boy
is talking to the reporter
about wanting to be able to eat,
drink water, play with his friends,
go to school.  Like it was
before, he tells her; but before
is a long time ago, a long time away,
a place he can go to now
only in longing.  I listen
to his small, soft voice
on the radio, recorded
yesterday, and ask myself
if he is still alive today.
He had been talking
about the sky, filled with drones
but also with birds.  He wants to live
like the birds, he said, the sky
is not crowded with sewage and death 
like the ground, the streets.

Day 335

The children go walking through charred fields.
Their legs are thin, they tire more quickly
than they did only months ago.  They are remembering
when there were strawberries, watermelons,
zucchini.  They speak about them as though
they were lost friends:  the texture, the sweetness,
the smell of the house with zucchini roasting in oil
and garlic.  Can’t you almost taste it? one
of them asks the others; and the others
nod, lick their lips, look out
over the ravaged grasses, blackened earth,
and see, for a moment, fields of abundant red and green.