Day 482/Ceasefire Day 12

Fragments of lives —
shattered, unrecognizable.
The rubble ground to nothing, bulldozed.
Impossible to tell there was even
a house here, a block of houses.
The child has walked his small dog
all the way from the south, 
a rope for a leash.  He arrives at last
with his father at the place
his father thinks was home.
The dog sniffs what seems like
nothing but broken stones. 
Sniffs, stops.  Is this the place?
Was this where the garden was?
Was this where the wall was
with windows that looked out
on the rows of vegetables?   
The dog sniffs and sniffs.  The boy
stands, watching her.  The father,
too, watches the dog, wonders
what she has found.  Sunlight
falls on his shoulder.  He wipes
his eyes, remembering.

Day 481/Ceasefire Day 11

(for A.)

It was a dream, a wish to get back
to the north
But finally after 15 months, we are
back the young man
writes to me, and All my family
members are ok
I moved from sleeping in streets
to be under a roof
It’s like moving from hell to heaven
We must remember
there are stories like this one.
The young man buried
for three days under the rubble
with his wife, their unborn baby
dead, goes back to his family home
(his own place destroyed)
after fifteen months
and finds everyone there, waiting.
The bed of his childhood waiting.
Food waiting, warmth. We must remember
that in the midst of loss (his friend
martyred days before
the cease fire, the child
in the womb for eight months — who
would he have been?) there is also joy.
Welcoming.  Celebration.
That sadism, brutality, destruction
cannot claim their victory.
That among the crushed streets
the spirit survives, not crushed.

Day 480/Ceasefire Day 10

They cried every night, these two brothers,
for months:  cried for their cousins,
their friends, their school,
their house.  But today
they are walking, part of the endless 
procession home!  Today
they have eaten, today
they are looking ahead,
behind, all around, and what they see
is the ocean of people on their way
back north.  Who has given them
these drums?  Did they carry them
with them through all
the displacements?  The drums
have survived the bombings,
the fires, the snipers’ bullets.
Like these boys, they are whole,
strong.  The brothers stand,
beating their drums, singing
in their sweet unbroken voices
as the people walk by: elderly fathers
carried on the shoulders
of their sons, a woman being pushed
in a makeshift wheelchair, weeping.
cheering. The boys beat out
their song: Today
is the first day of the revolution!
The first day of the new moment
we will rebuild!  Today
is the first day of our freedom!

Day 479/Ceasefire Day 9

They are walking north, toward
what had been their lives.
An endless line of people: parents
carrying children, children
carrying younger children, old
people walking slowly, some
being pushed in wagons,
infants on their fathers’ backs.
They are walking north, knowing
that when they arrive 
what they’ll find
is not what they remember,
knowing that the anguished work
of digging will perhaps yield
the bones, the skulls
of those who were martyred,
whose hands they can still feel
touching their hands, whose laughter
has been absorbed by the dust.  They
are walking north.  Some are singing.
Some have tears running down their faces.
One says, It’s like being able to return
to the villages of our grandparents.
Another says, sobbing, If only
my grandfather had lived
to see this day. A boy says, Tomorrow
we will begin to rebuild. A woman
keeps thinking she sees
her children, though she knows
their small bodies have decomposed
under the rubble.  They are with me,
she thinks to herself.  I am
bringing them home.

Day 478/Ceasefire Day 8

Clothing is strewn on the hard ground
in front of where the hospital stood:
scrubs, hospital gowns,
jeans, t-shirts, jackets visitors wore
and people sheltering.  This is no
art exhibit but the remnants
of lives, signifiers of an hour
when people were driven
from their beds, iv’s ripped out, those
too weak or too disabled to walk
carried by others.  Stripped, beaten,
nurses and doctors along with their patients,
elderly ones, young amputees.  Here
are their last possessions.  Here
are the markers of their time
inside the ruined walls:  a shirt
slipped over someone’s head
in the chilly morning.  A white coat
worn in the last examination
all someone’s years of training
led up to: Vigilant ear
assessing the level
of congestion.  The final listen   
to the final heartbeat.  

Day 477/Ceasefire Day 7

You wanted to go back
to what it was:  your room
with its colored curtains, your bookshelf,
your desk with the papers you meant
to set in order. Your father
pruning the trees in the last light
of day.  Your mother
walking in from work,
having stopped on the way
for greens, lentils, flour.
Your brothers with their laptop
streaming sports, your little sister
with her kitten and her wild hair.
You wanted to go back
and find everyone
as you’d left them, as though
it were simply the following day,
as though the genocide
hadn’t happened, had been
only a nightmare, and you could 
find them at home again, tell your brothers
to lower the volume, help
your mother put away the groceries,
call your father inside before dinner
was ready, feed
the kitten, take a soft brush
to your sister’s hair
as you’d done the evening before
and the evening before that.  

Day 476/Ceasefire Day 6

Children cheer as the trucks
roll in.  Even Nutella
is being distributed!
At the far end of the road,
a boy who could be ten, eleven,
stands watching the others,
tears running down his face.
His best friend is not
here, was killed just days
before the ceasefire.  The boy
remembers how they both loved Nutella,
would spread thick swathes 
of it on thick slices of bread
in the years they would walk
home together from school.
Now it will never taste
the same, he thinks.
How is it I’m crying
about Nutella, he goes on,
when so much else
has been ruined?  Only a week
before, when the ceasefire
had been announced but bombs
were falling even more brutally,
he’d sat on a slab of concrete
with his friend, naming the things
they missed that perhaps 
they might have again.  Nutella,
his friend had called out, laughing,
knowing that what was gone
forever — his house, his cousins,
his mother — would not be counted.

Day 475/Ceasefire Day 5

You want to rejoice
that the sky is not filled
with warplanes, the trucks
have been allowed in, carrying
food, medicine.  That the children
can play outdoors.  You want
to rejoice, to run shouting and singing
through the streets – but the streets
you find when you return
to the city you lived in all your life
have been bombed to gravel,
are nothing you know.  You see someone
crouched over rubble, realize
it’s your neighbor.  You walk
toward each other like two ghosts
meeting in an afterworld 
they’d never imagined.  It’s good,
you say to him; and he smiles
at you, answers, Yes, it’s good.
Beneath you, where once
there were flourishing gardens,
the souls of your lost ones
stir, turn, then rest
more deeply, knowing at last
that you have come back.

Day 474/Ceasefire Day 4

You come home
to find bodies
under the rubble.  So much
has been eroded.  So much
detroyed.  What remains
is bone.  Hair gone, eyes
gone, lips gone.  Soft belly,
warm flesh.  You see half
of a silver ring.  A heel
of a shoe.  What
was a life is reduced
to minerals.  You come home
hoping to find a remnant,
a memory.  A cup handle?
A clock?  Instead
you dig out the bodies
of those you loved,
like the long decayed trunks
of fallen trees.  Like skeletons 
of fish the tide unburies
as it recedes.

Day 473/Ceasefire Day 3

A boy on his donkey
is shot by a sniper.  Killed.
A man runs to retrieve his body
and is killed as well.  It’s the third day
of the ceasefire but the soldiers
don’t want to stop.  Their habit
is killing, what they know
is to fix a target in their sight,
point, fire.  The boy
had been happy:  he’d had enough food
for the first time in months.  He’d fed
his donkey.  He’d been thinking
how it would be 
to go back to school, to look
for his friends, see who
was still living.  The boy
had survived this long
when the sniper found him.
The sniper was bored: a long
afternoon, not much action.
It was the third day
of what they were still calling
a ceasefire.  Why now? Why
this child?