Day 400

The poet speaks of a mother
dragging her two daughters quickly,
being chased by a tank.  A young man —
the poet — argues with his father
about which kind of plane
is dropping bombs 
on their neighborhood. Night 
illumined by fire.  The children
running as fast as they can, tripping,
the mother picking up the smaller one,
wiping her dusty face 
as she runs.  Explosion
after explosion.  You can feel
(as the poet describes
it) how desperate, how terrified
they are.  No way even
to find the road, so littered
with concrete.  With bodies.
We never see planes in the sky
in Gaza, the poet tells us, except
for the ones that are attacking us.

Day 399

Hard to imagine these children
singing.  Hard to imagine 
their voices strong, a choir
of children’s voices singing
in a large tent with their teacher
conducting.  Listen!  There is joy
in their singing, the joy
of forty, fifty children
singing together on little chairs
in a tent, watching their teacher.
Can they forget for a moment
the dust, the bombings?  Their
missing friends?  Even their hunger?
Daylight shines, opaque,
through the canvas panels.  Late
autumn, the afternoon
bronze-golden.  No one, this
minute, in this tent, seems
in danger of dying.

Day 398

The streets you walked since childhood
are gone.  The buildings
your classes were in, the bakery,
the café where you sat
with your friends for long hours.
The table stacked with sweets
and coffee, the one chair
that wobbled, a leg too short.
They’re gone now:  the chairs, the tables.
The yellow awning.  The cigarettes,
their lit ends punctuating the night.
The friends with their shouting,
their laughter.  What was it 
you’d been talking about?  What
was your side of the argument
that seemed so crucial?  The poet
you liked, whom others didn’t?
A memory someone thought
mistaken?  You’d walk home,
still conjuring responses, 
as a fine rain started falling
and cars with their stippled
headlights turned the corner.
How could all that
have disappeared, become
dust and grief?

Day 397

A cat waits at what was the window
of a house that was her house.
Every night she would greet the man
who was the father of the house.
He would pick her up, he would stroke her.
His hands would run through her fur.
She knew what time he would walk
through the door, what time
he would feed her.  She knew
she would sleep on the bed
beside him when he turned out the lights. 
After the bombing, when
the man was taken to the hospital
and the rest of the family had fled the house
and the dust had settled in the fallen rooms,
the cat emerged from the place she had hidden.
She climbed over the rubble, up to the window
where she had sat every day, waiting for him.
She waits. She waits. Now and then
there’s a mouse to eat, an insect if nothing else.  

Day 396

How will you mourn your child?
She was a small child
squatting in dirt, playing
with stones, making a house
of stones.  Stone table,
stone chairs.  Now
she is not even ashes; 
only a little canvas backpack,
a few little toys, a t-shirt
on the floor of the tent.  How will you 
mourn her when you can’t 
lay her body to rest?
What is she now? A few shards
of bone amid rocks and ruins,
a bloodstain in dust,
a yellow shoe.  How
will you mourn her
when there is nothing
left of her?  

Day 395

A mother takes her child to a medical tent
for her second polio vaccine, and the plane overhead
drops its bomb at precisely that moment.  Child, mother,
nurse, all lie in the dust.  The mother’s other children,
the ones who didn’t come, wait for them
in their tent, and their aunt waits with them.
Soon they will know who is not coming back.
Soon they will wonder whether their sister
had her second vaccine before she was killed.
It’s important, the sister closest in age to her says.
She was the weakest among us.  That’s why
our mother took her for the vaccine — we were afraid
that if any of us got polio, it would be her.  Our mother
wanted to keep her strong.

Day 394

Believe me when I say these children
walked two miles to get clean water
for their family and two miles
to bring it back.  They did this
every morning, whatever
the weather.  They carried jugs,
pots, any container they could find.
Their mother waited in their tent
with the two littlest ones.  Their father
already had been killed.  The children —
six and seven — would otherwise
have been walking to school, and this
is what sometimes they pretended
to do.  There was not
a genocide, there were not drones
constantly overhead, their father
and older brothers were still
alive, there was no
chance the water would be
contaminated and if they didn’t
hurry they’d be late
for class…Believe me
when I say this is what
they pretended on their way
to get water, what
they were pretending
the moment everything
went dark, their jug
in pieces on the ground, the pots
they’d been carrying
rolling away from their bodies.

Day 393

What will you take with you
if you die? the small child 
asks his mother.  She looks at him.
It’s cold, the dark comes early.
She cannot imagine being without him
and she cannot imagine saying
I will take you, even though
that may be what he’s asking.
I’ll take the sky, she tells him,
and the birds, and the fields
of eggplant and zucchini.  I’ll take
the orange trees and the olive trees.
But then, the child responds, those things
won’t be here, I won’t be able
to see them.  I’ll take your smile
and your voice, his mother says.
I’ll take them all in a way
that will let me have them and let
you, who will still be alive, have them
too.  The child looks at his mother,
trying to understand.  Planes
fly overhead.  The sound of bombing,
that has marked their days and nights
for over a year, grows more intense.

Day 392

On a single day, in a single hour,
you lost twenty-one people
in your family.  Father, brother, sister,
sister, niece, nephew:  count them,
name them, tell their stories
so they will not go under the rubble
forgotten.  This one was going to university.
This one was fixing his house.  This one
was ten years old, this one twelve.
The smallest one was just learning to talk.
Speak of their voices, the shapes of their mouths,
the gestures they made when they were excited.
Speak of the things they liked to eat, the way
one of them smiled a little when she
was embarrassed. Imagine the children
grown.  Imagine them loving, singing, working.
Hold each of them in your mind. Say the goodbyes
you never got to say.  Carry them with you
as you go about your day, though no one
can see them:  a grief so heavy
it bows your shoulders as you walk.

Day 391

A choir of children in a makeshift school.
Their teacher plays a stringed instrument —
oud? — to accompany them.  They’re young,
maybe eight, ten, eleven.  Their voices
are sweet, soft.  They are singing a song —
maybe a kind of ballad — with 
a refrain.  They’re aware
of the video someone is making; some of them 
look occasionally toward the camera.  One girl looks
for a longer time than the others.  Her face
intense, her eyes clear.  Her arms thin:  how long
has it been since she’s eaten anything 
but bread, a little cheese, zaatar? How many
more months, weeks, days, will she survive?  And what
will it be that takes her:  hunger? sickness? a random
sniper shot?  Fire? She keeps singing as she watches
the camera, as though someone is purposefully
making a record of this:  this song, this serious
deliberate gaze. That she has lived.