Day 357

Two children walk 
through a garden
they’ve made
in the midst of tents.
Vegetables, fruit. How
are they watering them, 
that they’ve grown
so green, so large?
Fragrance of jasmine,
oregano, sage.  Difficult
not to believe hope is useless.
Unbearable to look
at the blank expressions,
the shuffling walks,
the night sky
populated not by stars
but by warplanes. Yet the children
are laughing, running, bending
to look at what was not ripe
just days ago but today
will be harvested, eaten.

Day 356

What falls from the sky
is a child, and another child.
You saw them playing
with friends, with a soccer ball,
a stray dog.  Now children, ball,
dog are indistinguishable, have become
dust and smoke and memory.  What
if the crater the bomb made
could become a lake
suddenly filled with fresh,
clear water? What if you — child
who witnessed your friends
dissolve into a torrent of fire —
could summon them, call
their names, watch as they stood
reconstituted, whole — boy,
boy, dog — and began to move
toward you to a gleaming place
where all of you could drink and be sated?

Day 355

A child is walking outside a school
that is not a school anymore
but a shelter.  She is walking
without looking at anything, not even
the dust, not even the sky.  It has been months
since she lost her parents, her brothers,
her aunt.  Months since she woke 
in her bed, dressed for school,
walked with her friends past houses
and gardens.  The child is thin;
she has lost the weight of her family.
She has lost the weight of the hours
she loved, the voices, the stories.
Her mind is a field where nothing
grows, a blank space
predatory birds cross over
and do not stop.

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.