Day 492/Ceasefire Day 22

(for Asem Alnabih and Refaat Alareer)

What greater act of friendship
than to search for the body
of your friend for days,
going from one 
destroyed home to another,
asking this person, that person,
and at last finding the makeshift grave
in someone’s destroyed
yard, a piece of paper
on a stick, the handwritten
(with a blue Expo marker?) name
of your friend and the day he was murdered?
What greater love
than to walk, carrying his body
and the bodies of those
who were killed with him
to the graveyard in the neighborhood
he lived in from childhood, the place
he loved best?  Imagine that procession,
four bodies in a single bag, other bodies
in other bags, your friend’s body
not even whole.  Bodies recognized
from the clothes they were wearing,
since the flesh, the features, had decomposed.
What greater tribute 
than that walk,
finally to lay your friend to rest
in a known place, a place
he would have asked for?  

Day 491/Ceasefire Day 21

This mother is calling her children
to gather around her, the living children
and the dead.  Come, she says,
it is night, I will tell you a story.
How you have grown! she says
to the youngest, the one
who stopped growing, then
grew smaller and smaller, 
who died because he was hungry.
How beautifully you have learned
to speak, she tells the one
whose face was destroyed, whose mouth
could never be found.  One daughter
who’s alive holds a living sister
and a sister who died
on her lap, strokes
their long hair, whispers
something to them
that makes them both laugh.
The mother hushes them gently.
Listen now to the story
I’m about to tell you, she
says.  It’s our story.  It’s
the story of how we will
always return
to this place, the story
of why we died
and how we have stayed alive.

Day 490/Ceasefire Day 20

The family comes back to the place
where their house was.  They have survived
except for one: their father’s brother.
When the house was destroyed,
their uncle was killed.  The rest
fled south, managed somehow
to live.  Now they’ve come back,
though what they’ve come back to
is nothing they can live in.  They search
in the rubble for their uncle, for anything
they can find that was his.  Nothing.
They plant their tent over what was
their living room.  All day they clear
stones, fallen concrete.  At night they stand
together under the stars.  We
have survived, except
for one.  The littlest girl
thinks she sees her uncle in a shadow
the moon makes.  Her brother
says he thought he saw him earlier,
between parts of collapsed walls.  Their father
says he heard his brother’s voice
telling him to lift this slab, not that one.
Then he is here with us, the littlest one
says, and the night sky fills
for a moment with his face, his words. 

Day 489/Ceasefire Day 19

Refaat’s mother dreams Refaat
comes to visit her in a white gown,
wearing an elegant watch.  She
has bought a special watch
to give him, but when she sees him
she knows the watch he has
is better.  What could this mean?
The white gown?  Like the white cloth
Refaat wanted us to buy 
to make kites?  Could it be
kite-cloth?  For him to sail,
a white kite in the sky?  Cloudless
sky, sky without warplanes.
And the watch?  Does his mother
meet him, bearing a watch
that tells the time of our days,
the time we are living in,
rubble time, rebuild time? Grieving time,
time to measure our losses, time
to know how long it will take
for our souls to come back
into our bodies, weary bodies
from all these months?  And Refaat’s
watch — is it the watch
of infinite time, stretch
of eternity, vast perspective
in which Gaza is held,
where the hills will be green again,
the buildings whole again and forever,
the streets filled with people?

Day 488/Ceasefire Day 18

(for Refaat Alareer, a call and response)

Plumes of black smoke.
They have found the body of Refaat.
The ceasefire has made it possible.
Ash of anything that remains
besides stone and concrete.
After more than a year
they’ve identified him, given him
a proper burial.
Will the soldiers as they retreat
not allow even one small thing
to be preserved?  One ribbon
of clothing, one
child’s shoe?  When he was murdered
there were houses here, streets.  Cafés.
They are burning everything
they have not destroyed.  There
was a university.  There was a clinic.
Twice, three times, I dreamed
he was not dead, he was hiding,
he would re-emerge
when the worst was over.
He would tell his story.
There are children digging
to find whatever they can find.
His oldest child murdered too, his small grandson.
Now their lives are lived over corpses.
Now these graves are their playground.
Now they sleep on the ruins of their homes.
Now we know where he lies.  His words, his poems
reach across the world.  Now we know
where he is.  And he has
not been destroyed. He is everywhere.

Day 487/Ceasefire Day 17

We were never defeated, the girl
tells her small brother, too small
to understand the words; but the girl
wants him to know.  They destroyed
our house, set fire to the shelter
we lived in, deprived us
of water.  But we never gave up.
When they cut the electricity
we took it from the sun.
When they bombed the hospitals
the doctors made makeshift hospitals
in tents.  When there was no
gauze, we borrowed it
from the dead.  When there
was no food, we gathered greens
that grew between slabs of concrete,
cooked fallen birds over fires
we made from sticks.  We were hungry,
we ate.  We wrapped you
in whatever clothes we weren’t
wearing, slept with you
between us so you could be warmed
by the warmth of our bodies.
You need to know this, you
who are too young
to tell your own story.  This
is our story. They blasted our streets,
wore our neighborhoods down
to gravel.  But they never
silenced us.  They never crushed us.

Day 486/Ceasefire Day 16

Say they were baking bread.  They
were sitting in the front room
drinking coffee, talking
about nothing important.  The fragrance
of rising bread pervading
the house.   Say the children
were playing some game, running
from one room to the next,
hiding, squealing.  Say it was just
a day, a day folded in among others.
Nothing remarkable.  Clear sky.
No drones, no warplanes.  Say
there had never been bombings.
Say everyone in the family
was alive, not thinking
of wounds, amputations,
rank odors of sewage.  Say
there had always been food.
Say the water was clean.  Say
they awakened, ate, worked.
Say the children came home
and told what they’d learned.
Say there was never this destruction,
these ravaged buildings, concrete
and stones, miles of broken walls.
Say the hospitals were standing.
classes being taught at the universities.
Say there was never the sound of explosions, 
never these bones lying under the ground.  

Day 485/Ceasefire Day 15

Later you will tell the children
who’ll be born when these atrocities
have ended once and forever, whose
lives will have begun with the liberation —
later you will tell them, stroking
their small, safe heads, looking
into their unclouded eyes, that there were those
who walked for miles to reach this place,
carrying the few belongings they had,
carrying their children, their parents,
on their backs.  Later you will tell them,
because it will be important that they know,
there were families who slept in graveyards,
who felt they were as dead as those
who slept under the ground.  You will tell them
you knew a woman who buried the severed limbs
of her children when no whole body
was found;  a child whose parents
were killed before he had breathed
one single day; a man who was imprisoned
in another country before he’d even told
people there the stories of that time.  They will question
you, puzzled, incredulous.  You will tell them
this is enough for now; but we must not forget.
Then they will race each other from the house,
through the orchard, their bare small feet
wet from sweet morning grass,
and look out over fields abundant with what
you will have planted in soil
soaked with blood, nourished by the bones of the martyred. 

Day 484/Ceasefire Day 14

Even the donkey is dead,
killed in a shelling.  Patient,
stalwart donkey
who pulled the cart
loaded with all their things, with
other things too:  what food there was,
carried in the cart to those
too weak or wounded
to get it themselves.  Uncomplaining
donkey, pulling the cart
day and night, in heat, 
freezing rain. Tell me: why
should even this animal
have been murdered?  He
was the boy’s friend 
after other friends
were killed.  He was there
waiting each morning,
humble, willing.  Lowering his head
to let the boy harness him.  Hungry
like the boy.  Thirsty
like the boy.  Like
the boy, in pain.

Day 483/Ceasefire Day 13

She dreams her mother is in the room.
She dreams there’s a room.
She dreams her right hand
is attached to her wrist.
She dreams she’s able to write a letter.
She dreams she’s grown skilled
at using her left hand.  She dreams
her right hand has become a flag,
a banner, a wide-winged bird
in a clear sky. A sky
that is free.  She dreams that 
at the same time it’s her hand.  
With her right hand she draws a house
in the sky.  A room.  Her mother.
She has been walking for so long,
her father, her brothers beside her.
She dreams she has never
lost her hand, that
they’ve come back 
to a clear sky, where everything is alive.
Where her hand is alive.
Where her mother becomes 
a wide-winged bird, who
shields them.  Covers them.