Day 354

Pieces of flesh flying everywhere
after the explosion.  The doctor,
so near he is amazed
to still be alive, asks himself
whether he should go in
and try to rescue whomever he can
or whether a second explosion
will come and that one 
will get him.  He goes.  He knows
he cannot not go.  He finds
a man screaming under the rubble,
a bone sticking out of one leg, blood
everywhere.  My kids! he is screaming.
My kids!  Where are my children?
The doctor digs him out with his hands.
takes off his own shirt, makes it a tourniquet.
The man doesn’t stop screaming his childrens’ names.
They listen together as pieces of bodies
fall like leaves all around them
for voices the man knows.
They listen, listen.

Day 353

The boy was making dinner
for himself and his father.
A little zucchini, a little rice.
Not much food, but better than nothing.
He added an onion, a slice of garlic.
When you have practically nothing
it’s all delicious, the boy 
was thinking,  His father
had taught him to cook, was
proud of him, was out
doing what work he could find.
When you have practically nothing
you do what you can.  The boy
was standing in the kitchen, the smell
of onion, garlic, oil filling
the air, overcoming the stench
outside the window 
of rotting garbage, rotting corpses.
Then suddenly a neighbor
burst through the door, his face
ashen, his hands shaking.
There was a sniper, he said.
Your father is dead, he said.
The boy stood over the stove,
stirring the zucchini, the onion, the garlic.
What will my life be now?
Who will come and eat with me now?

Day 352

The boy is sitting on the ground
in front of his tent, sounding out
words.  A year ago he had been learning
to read; then everything ended.
Seven times his family has pitched
and unpitched their tent.  Seven times
the boy has picked up his books,
his backpack, and walked
to the next place.  It’s
all right, his father has said;
So many have died but we are still alive.
Your mother, your sisters — we
are living.  The boy looks
into his father’s eyes.  He has learned
to read faces better than words.  He has
learned to read sky, shadow, movements.
This is the sinister knowledge of war.
These are the phonetics of genocide.

Day 351

Bring boiled water (if you can find
water and fuel), try cleansing
the wound.  We don’t know
which of us will be alive
tomorrow.  Do what you can,
treat the injury as though
the leg, the arm, the chest
will heal, as though you knew
that rest was possible, as though
the sufferer could be cared for,
the sutures monitored, removed.
Bring whatever you can, treat
this person as though
you could be assured that nothing
else will harm him.  As though
it were an ordinary time
and you could send him 
back to his home.

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.