photo by Ali Hamad/APA

When the genocide began I started writing daily notes. The notes, many of them handwritten in various notebooks,  were disconnected lines, images, stories I’d read or heard. Some of them evolved into poems, included in this collection; but it wasn’t until Day 167 that — having heard about a mother who was able to save one of her children but not the others, and a doctor who was saving the amputated limbs of wounded children, putting the limbs into boxes labeled with their names —  I felt the urgency to document these tragedies in a whole poem every day, and that is what I will do until the genocide ends.
I intend to keep writing until the ceasefire is permanent — until Palestine is free.

Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

Day 402

No one can find who this small child
belongs to.  No one
knows her name, or how
she happened to lose her hand.
The family who took her in
from the hospital
has tried every name they know
to see if she shows a response.
So far, nothing.  They’ve named her
for a cousin of theirs who was killed.
Daily they teach her how to live
with one hand and no parents.
Her other hand drifts
in a world of dream and memory.
It knows who she is.  She strokes
her mother’s cheek with it, holds
a strand of her sister’s hair.  At night
it finds her, visits her in her sleep.
Settles in.  Waves goodbye
to everything that’s missing.

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

Day 401

Once there was a hospital in this place.
There were surgeons, nurses,
operating rooms with lights, instruments.
Once there were patients who came
seeking help, who lay in their beds
and spoke with doctors
who explained what would happen,
who offered medicine.
Once there was medicine for pain
that the medicine made bearable.
Now the hospital has collapsed,
the surgeons’ hands have been crushed, 
the children living in tents
in the hospital courtyard
have been burned alive, are nothing
but ash.  And there is no medicine
that could staunch these wounds,
that could end this pain.

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

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.

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

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.

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

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?

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

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.  

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

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?  

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

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.

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

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.

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Nora Barrows-Friedman Nora Barrows-Friedman

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.

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