Day 472/Ceasefire Day 2

Give me your hand, little sister.
We fled our home when you
were too young to remember.
What you know of this world
is the constant noise of bombings,
the pitch of drones, the stench
of blood, shit, corpses.  Give me
your hand.  I will show you —
now that you’re old enough
to walk — where we could take in
the fragrance of jasmine. The herbs
we planted: basil, sage.  I’ll show you
where flowers grew that attracted bees:
the sound you could have heard
though this first year of your life
was their humming and the flutter
of birds’ wings over the blossoms.
I’ll walk you to where
the lemon trees stood, show you
the place our father built a bench
where we sat in the shade on summer
afternoons.  Our house was there,
where I’m pointing.  I could tell you
what happened in every room
all my sixteen years: friends
who came, cousins
you’ll never know.  Here,
over these gray stones, is the way
I ran, carrying you.  Here’s
where our father was shot and killed.
Here is where you started to cry
from the noise and the smoke, and where
I took a path that was hidden and promised
to hold you until we were safe.  (Were we
ever safe?)  Here, little sister, is what
we’ve returned to. Here is where,
amid this wreckage and dust, we begin again.

Day 471/Ceasefire Day 1

The children are holding hands
and dancing, shouting.  Everyone
is outside:  no matter
the winter cold!  Some drones are still
crossing the sky, but the ceasefire
has happened!  It happened!
The girl goes back to where
her tent was; her brothers
are dismantling it, ripping
the flimsy nylon panels
that didn’t keep out
the rain, playing
tug of war with the shreds.
No use for them now!  We’re
going home!  She stands,
watching them. She is thinking
now about their mother,
who went out looking for food
one morning and never
came back.  She is thinking
about the garden they had
in the north, and how their mother
would have wanted to look
for it, see if anything green
could be peering out
from under the rubble,
and how she would have
tended it, nurtured it.  The girl
picks up a stone from the dusty ground
near where their tent had been,
puts it in her pocket.  This
is for my mother, she
thinks.  This is how
I will carry her home from this place,
lay her there where our garden was.

Day 470

He stopped along the way
because he saw a dog
who was injured, bleeding.
His own leg was wrapped
in gauze, a wound sustained
maybe a week before; and he bent,
unwound the end of the gauze
from his leg, bit it off,
wrapped it around the dog’s
leg.  The dog followed him:
quiet, limping.  The gauze
turned red with the dog’s
blood as the part still wrapped
around the man’s leg was red
with his blood.  So they walked,
a man whose family
had been killed, a dog
who maybe had belonged to someone,
who appeared out of nowhere,
who had probably been surviving
on rotting flesh.  So they walked
without food, without water,
until they came to a place
where the man sat down
on a pile of rubble
and the dog lay down
beside him.  Everything there
was dust. Everything there
had been flattened.  Maybe
they promised each other
something in that moment? Because those
who saw them walking together
wherever they were going afterward
said they never left
each other’s side.

Day 469

They are preparing to go back 
to their home in the north, this mother
and her two remaining children.
How long will it take them
to get there, just miles
away?  And what
will they see as they go?
Neighborhoods bulldozed
to nothing.  Rock and sand.
Raw sewage running in streets
that are barely streets anymore,
bodies still decomposing.
And their home?  The mother
knows it’s only rubble
under which her husband
lies buried, her two
older children. Yet
when these little ones
hear they’ll be allowed
to go home, they shriek
with happiness.  Are they young enough
to believe they’ll see their father again,
their two older brothers?
Do they think home
will be what it was before:
their toys in place, friends
playing ball next door?  She
doesn’t tell them.  Silently
she folds their few little things.
Maybe the sky will be 
what it was, she thinks:
the same hills in the distance,
same birds overhead? 

Day 468

The few things you still have, 
put them in this bag:  a notebook,
two pens, a needle you found
in a pile of rubble, catching the sun
one day.  Some thread unraveled
from a piece of someone’s shirt
you saw in another pile of lives
that had been destroyed.  A jacket
that belonged to a child:  how old
could she have been?  Three?
Four?  Little butterflies
on the front of it, a pink zipper.
A hood lined with nylon fleece.
How did it survive whole
when the child who wasn’t
wearing it exploded in fragments?
Too small for your child, but maybe
one day you’ll give birth
to another.  Take it
with you?  Take it
where?  Into some future
you can’t imagine but want
to believe in? 

Day 467

What use is a ceasefire, the girl
says to her brother, who isn’t
listening, when our parents
are dead, our sisters, the baby
who breathed two weeks and was
gone?  What use their telling us
we can go home, when there’s no
home anywhere?  Yet
children are linking arms, laughing
as they run down the ruined
streets. People are blasting music
from phones, dancing
over the rubble.  The girl
stands like a statue
outside her tent, shivers
a little from the cold.  It’s night.
Everyone’s awake.  Planes
are still crossing the sky.
She sees two girls she knows
racing past her, singing
some song she remembers
from before.  Before….
One of them waves to her
to come join them.  She takes
her brother’s cold small hand,
calls out to them — they’re far
ahead of her now — Wait! Wait for us!
Runs to catch up.

Day 466

It was her voice
she first noticed was lost
under the rubble.  No way
to call to her neighbors,
Find me!  Save me!  I’m here.
She lies wedged between
fallen blocks of concrete,
her chest so crushed
she can’t breathe enough air
to make a sound.  What
she can move
is one hand, which
she turns back and forth,
like someone signaling
“stop,” then “come here.”
It’s late afternoon, still light
enough for a while
for the hand to be seen.
She hears the voices
of those she knows
about to give up the search,
listens as though she were listening
from another world to the sounds
of the living.  She turns her hand
faster, faster, and someone’s eye
catches the movement — a trapped
bird?  a torn scrap of paper
blown by the wind? — 
and someone else shouts,
It’s a hand!  And then two, five,
seven people are in there, digging,
lifting the fallen walls caging her,
pulling her out:  hand, arm,
six year old body.  She is surprised,
when, held by a neighbor,
she finally starts crying,
to hear her own voice again. 

Day 465

Two children sit in a tent
made of rags, torn clothing. It’s
raining, rain soaks
the flimsy roof of the tent,
drips through the holes.
The older child
is teaching her brother to read
from an old magazine she found
long ago. No school
for over a year.  The girl
is trying to remember
how her teacher
taught her, pointing a finger
under the words, saying them
for her brother, asking him
to repeat.  They’re hungry, cold.
Between words the girl sits
on her hands to warm them.
Her brother cries when he can’t
get it right.  The magazine
is about things they don’t
understand — engines, cars,
trucks — but there are words
in it, and that’s all
that matters.  Overhead, planes bear
their relentless cargo.  On the ground
between their tent and the next, rain
pounds the decomposed carcass
of a cat or a dog. The girl
takes a pencil stub, writes
words she will teach her brother
in the margin of the page
of the magazine:
Rain, she writes.  Winter,
she writes.  Bomb. Wind.  Dead.

Day 464

Even the trees have been bombed,
the orange trees that were so fragrant,
the lemon trees, pomegranate.
Even the trees have had to bend,
bow, split apart like the arms
and legs of children.  The hillsides
that were green with trees,
the roads over which trees 
made dappled canopies:  all flattened
now, rubble and jagged stones.
At night you can hear the land cry
as wind rips through empty spaces.
Didn’t everything have roots? it
sighs.  Couldn’t it all
grow back, push up
through the ground, bear again
the fruit of its savaged memory?

Day 463

from a photograph that could be the Pietà

A mother sits, holding her child.
The child is maybe ten, eleven.
She’s wearing a white t-shirt, long
sleeves, pajama pants
with little hearts on them.  Some
of the hearts are drawn as though
they’re bordered by lace, some
not.  You can see that the child’s
right foot, as it protrudes
from her pajamas, is swollen
beyond recognition.  The mother,
who appears uninjured, looks down tenderly
at her daughter’s face, but the daughter
stares only straight ahead,
as though she sees nothing
at all, as though
what she sees is death. As though her eyes
have been blinded by fear or shrapnel.
She grasps her mother’s headscarf
with one hand, the hand
that may be holding on 
to the last shards of her life. 
There was a girl
who told silly stories to her mother
about her friends, her teachers.
There was a girl who asked
for heart pajamas, and her mother
found them, gave them to her
wrapped in colored paper.
How long ago was that?
How have they arrived here
on the bloodstained floor
of this hospital, how
can there be nothing but blankness
where this child is looking?