Day 350

I am thinking now of Refaat’s daughter,
the youngest, the one to whom
he had been reading stories, the one
who hadn’t liked to read and then
(during the bombings) loved it, started
reading constantly and writing
stories, her own stories, showing them
to her father.  I am thinking of her,
if she survives, twenty years
from now, a young woman
waking along some tree-lined
street, listening to the sounds
of her city but also to words
that start to form paragraphs
in her head:  her story, Refaat’s,
and how they intertwine and how
she is carrying it forward, playing
with language, inventing, asking
her father within her should I say
this or that, should I tell of the deaths
in this way, should I speak of those
I didn’t know, of a world
unknown to me, a world
you wanted to show me?
I am thinking about Refaat’s
youngest daughter and how
she must be hungry now, cold
as the nights move toward autumn,
missing her father.  I am wanting
to tell her to hold on
to every memory she has, the sweet
ones and the brutal ones, and to believe
that one afternoon twenty years
from now she will come home
from wherever it is she’s
been walking, sit down
at a desk that reminds her
of Refaat’s, take out
her pen, a sheet of paper.  Begin.

Day 349

Once you grew peaches.  Once
your children played in the orchard.
Once they sang in their classroom, 
they came home every afternoon
singing the songs they had learned.
You could hear the youngest child
sing under her breath, sing
to the cat, the chickens.  She held
the red hen in her arms, gathered
her eggs, sang to her every new
song she was learning.  Where
are the songs?  The classroom?
The hen?  Where are the peach trees
that now, in late September,
would be dropping their last
ripe fruit?

Day 348

All her father could find 
were her pink skates.
The rest of her buried
under the rubble,  Her laugh,
her stories about her friends,
the way her hands moved
when she spoke, her memories
of her grandfather — all buried,
everything but the skates
she’d pulled on
just minutes before
the bombing.  She had wanted
to be in school, she had wanted
to be in her garden.  Her friends
were skating so she put on
her skates.  No one could have known
what would happen.  There.  Then.
All her father could find of her
after he heard the explosion
were her pink skates, and he
will leave them on her feet
for eternity to know who she was.

Day 347

In her dreams she has both her arms.
She holds them over her head, catches
the wind as it rides through high leaves.
There are high leaves again, orchards
that bloom with sweet fruit in her dreams
that she can reach for, pluck
what she wants, bring it
to her lips.  In her dreams her arms
are waves, they flow and drift
and touch the shore.  In her dreams
she can hold anything:  the heavy
stones that rebuild her house,
her sister’s frailness, her father’s
able hands. She strokes one arm
with the other hand, feels the coolness
of her own flesh, the small hairs, taut muscles.
These were the arms that grew inside her mother.
These were the arms she used to grasp her life.

Day 346

Look at the birds, they are flying
beneath the warplanes.  They are looking
for trees they once sat in, roofs
where they built their nests.  They 
are contenting themselves
with these pieces of concrete, these fallen
ceilings.  The birds circle the rubble,
looking for what they can eat.  Are their wings
strong?  Can they still sing?  They are weaving
their way over parched land, burning grasses.
They ask for nothing and take what they find.
Look!  children are running
through fields where nothing grows,
following their paths, their arms
spread, dipping and veering,
making cries like birds.

Day 345

I am not a number; I am a blade of grass
in a field where animals graze until nightfall.
I am a star in a galaxy yet undiscovered,
an egg in the womb of a child unborn,
an egg in my grandmother’s womb
as she walks through ruined streets,
pregnant with my mother.  I am a voice
the wind echoes, a tree in a forest
sighing to other trees, leaning
against them.  I am not a number
recited on the news counting those
who died.  If I have died, look for me 
in the stamens of flowers, see
how infinitely I seed flower
after new flower until they cover
the fallen cities, the bodies torn, unfound.

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.