Day 460

The twelve year old boy 
goes to find water
to bring home to his family.
He is somehow still strong,
still able to walk on two legs.
Still able to carry water
with two hands.  He walks
past the rubble of his school,
past what were houses, a hospital.
The building where his best friend lived:
fallen, everyone who lived there
dead.  His friend, who,
on the last afternoon of his life,
challenged him to a race
and won.  Now I have to run
as fast as both of us combined,
run for both of us,
he thinks, and picks up
his pace, sprints
to where he’ll find water
to fill the jugs he’s holding,
carry them safely back, running
despite the water’s weight,
despite the road littered with ruins,
the drones overhead,
the snipers’ bullets.

Day 459

Each time her family has been displaced
the child brings her book
with her, the one book
she ran out of the house with
when the house was about
to be bombed.  It’s only because
it was what she happened
to be reading just then.  It wasn’t
her favorite book, not even
a very memorable book;  but now
she has read it over and over,
each time discovering
something new.  The book
has become like a trusted
friend:  she knows
exactly what it will bring her.
A story about a family
that travels a long way:  children
who play, who work
together, who have secrets
and jealousies.  Who stay alive.
Each time she goes back
into the book, she retrieves
a life.  Once she was able
to imagine a life like that,
a family like that, a trip
across an open land like that.
She returns to the book
as though it were a sheltering place.
As though it could take her in.

Day 458

(a report shows that 96% of children in Gaza think their death is imminent)

The child tells his older brother
he is sure he will die.
His brother looks at him.
They are twelve and eight.
Their father was killed a year ago.
Four siblings killed in a strike last month.
Their mother is alive, the baby alive,
but it’s cold and they’re hungry
and barefoot and they have
no winter jackets. If I can find you
a jacket, the older boy
asks, do you think you can stay alive?
The younger one is silent.  If I can
find you a jacket and a pair
of shoes?  Silence.  The younger boy
looks at the ground.  The air is filled
with the stench of death and sewage.
A jacket and a pair of shoes
and a bowl of soup?  the older
boy goes on, and at this
the younger one looks up
at his brother.  Lentil soup?
he asks, with bread? and his brother
nods.  And the younger one
says, his voice
weak with hunger,
tiredness, defeat, Yes, ok.

Day 457

Orders come that the hospital
must be evacuated, despite
the doctors telling them
it’s impossible:  too many patients,
illness and injuries too severe.
The old man gets help
rising from his bed.  Weeks
since he tried to walk.  Slowly
he detaches the iv’s:  fluids,
antibiotics, other medicines
he doesn’t know the use for.
Hands shaking, he moves
through the corridors.  Everyone
broken, stumbling, using the walls
to steady themselves.  He joins
the hobbled procession
out of the inferno the hospital
is already becoming.  Where they are
supposed to be going is far,
farther than the old man
has walked in years.  He takes the arm
of a younger man.  They walk
together.  Where they are going
is only another stopping place,
he thinks, and remembers a rock
he stood on once, years before
in another place,
in a rushing river, attempting to reach
the far riverbank, deafening water
crashing around him, relentless current
threatening to overcome him,
carry him away.

Day 456

The journalist’s wife is in labor
while he must go
to report on yet another atrocity,
and before he can see his newborn son,
he and his colleagues are killed.
The child comes into the world
and his father leaves.  Did they
salute one another in the doorway,
moving in different directions?
The mother lies in her hospital bed,
cradling her infant, who 
has no father.  For now
he is warm enough, dry enough.
For now he is strong, whole.
Who knows when or whether
they will be driven
out of the hospital?  Who knows
what the conditions will be
when they get to their tent?  For now
the infant is alive, the mother
numbed with grief but healthy.
Who will protect them now
from cold?  From rain and wind?
She pulls her son even closer to her body,
as though she could shelter him there
(as she did all these months)
until the bombing stops.

Day 455

The boy sits on a hospital bed.
He has been evacuated to Egypt.
No one is here with him:  an airstrike
has killed his father, his mother, every one
of his siblings.  How
has he been the one
to survive? He has one leg:
the other leg, too, he has left
behind, amputated without anesthesia.
Now in this hospital
they have had to remove
even more of the leg: infection
of the femur, close to the hip.
He sits, staring at the doorway
no one but doctors and nurses
comes through: he wears
a blood pressure cuff,
a pulsometer. What does it matter,
he thinks.  And wonders
whether they’ll keep on
cutting off more and more
of him – hip, stomach, chest,
arms, neck, eyes, ears, even
his teeth, even
his forehead – until
he is like his family.  Until
he is nothing.  Powder, dust, particles.

Day 454

Three children are standing
outside the tent they have made
from bits of cloth, plastic wrapping,
paper.  It has all fallen apart
in the rain.  It’s not
a tent anymore but a tangle of wetness,
one piece indistinguishable
from another, the way bodies
that have been bombed —
their parents, their brothers —
become indistinguishable
from each other.  The way,
when they went to find them
in the place where they had been
killed, the children found hands,
toes, pieces of shirts; but no
parents.  No brothers.  No
whole bodies they could
identify.  Three children stand
in the rain, sorting through
what had sheltered them
for a while, trying to identify
one panel, one shred of cloth:
this was the door we made,
this was what we used to hang
over what we called a window.  But now
with everything else that isn’t
left for them, this too — 
the naming of things —
is slipping away from them
in the rain that keeps falling, falling.

Day 453

from a photograph

The doctor walks slowly
through the rubble of his hospital,
tanks surrounding him.  He is alone,
the only one walking.
He is still in his white coat.
He knows with each step
he approaches what may be his death.
He thinks of his son, who was killed
just weeks ago.  Another son,
still alive.  Is he thinking about
the years he has lived? The hospital
broken, shattered.  Agonized patients.
His parents, his training, his wife?  Those
he has worked with through all these months?
Despite the wound in his leg
he moves without stopping, deliberately.
With each step he knows he is moving closer
to their snipers, their taunts,
their instruments of torture.
He moves slowly, steadily.
They cannot take this from him:
his dignity, his steadfastness,
whatever they are planning to do to him.

Day 452

The doctors can’t cure this nine month old child
of the bacteria that occupies his gut
because there are few antibiotics
and the water he needs to rehydrate
is the same contaminated water he drank
that gave him the infection.
If he were elsewhere, if this were another time,
he would go home, be fed, hydrated, given
medicines, and heal.  His parents
know that what he needs
will kill him, but what can they do?  He’s
thirsty, he’s crying out for water. 
What they can give him
will soothe his thirst and poison him.
And the doctors who save him for an hour,
a night, know that they’re saving him
only to see him buried, days
from now, in the hospital yard. 

Day 451

One of the infant twins
dies of cold.  A day later
the other follows.  Their mother,
whose womb was so full, sits
in the freezing tent
with empty arms.  They’d grown
so still, who moved
vibrantly for weeks inside her.
Their cries had become weaker
than they were the minute
they’d slipped into this world.
In the end they even stopped
sucking the trickles of milk
she offered them.  First one,
then the other.  She had imagined them
playing, walking, pulling off
each other’s shoes, giggling.
Now all she has left of them
are their names.  Now
she must put away their tiny shirts,
the cloths she swaddled them in.