Day 500/Ceasefire Day 30

The house was always filled
with the voices of children:
little ones shrieking as they chased
each other through the rooms, older ones
talking, arguing, kicking a ball
in the courtyard, their shouts
coming in through the open window.
Now there’s no window.  No house.
Now there are voices missing.
Now the little ones still alive
are older, subdued.  Now one
of the older girls stands
on a slab of concrete in the rain,
and when she's told to come
inside the tent they’ve pitched
over the rubble, she looks up,
looks away, can barely answer,
can barely string a few words
together.  She who loved to sing
doesn’t sing anymore.  She
who used to be told be quiet,
turn out the light, stop
keeping your sisters awake,
doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t want
to think of her sisters no
longer there:  the older one
with her tangled hair.  The younger one,
whose hand she held every night
as they fell asleep.

Day 499/Ceasefire Day 29

(for Abubaker)

He wanders the ruined land, one place
disturbingly like another:  no way
to orient, no landmarks, only the sun
in its consoling predictability, moving
across the sky, tracing east, west.
He is looking for what remains.  He
is looking for what he remembers.
At moments, a sign:  the shape
of a building surmised from the part
that still stands.  A tree that, unfathomably,
survives, its roots seeking nourishment
from far underground, where bombs
could not penetrate.  He wanders, 
looking for what was there, for what
will be there again.  Sometimes he thinks
he can see people walking, carrying
vegetables, bread.  Sometimes
he hears a lively conversation: students
talking about a book, a lecture
they’ve just heard by a loved professor.
He walks the ruined land
populating it with those
who were killed, vowing to them
that their voices, their dreams, will not be lost.

Day 498/Ceasefire Day 28

Our lives are not rubble.
Our lives are the tree-lined avenues
that were here before, and will be here again.
We will walk, we will sit in cafés
and remember how we rebuilt them.
We will find new books to replace
the ones that have gone to dust, new stories
to add to the old ones.  We will not forget:
we will weave the names of our dead
into our own names, into the names
of children yet to come.  We will take the rubble
in our hands, hold it tenderly, lovingly,
because it contains all the things
we have lost; and then use it
to build what we build anew.  
Our hands will be warmed by grief and memory.
Memory and grief and joy will be braided 
into the walls we make, the rugs
we will walk on, the curtains
we’ll part to look out on what
we will have created. 

Day 497/Ceasefire Day 27

In the night, her child
comes back to ask her questions.
She sleeps in a tent
on the rubble of her house.  Why?
the child asks.  Why was our house
taken down?  And what
do these stones mean?  She turns,
restless, listening to the rain
that pounds the tent.  Why
did you leave me
alone?  the child
asks her.  Did you have to run
so fast, you could not 
find me?  She wakes,
opens the flap of the tent.  Rain
wets her face more than the tears
already there.  She’s not
even asleep, but her child
is still asking his questions.
She wants to tell him
the whole story:  how
she tried to get to him
but the wall between them
had already collapsed.  How
she grabbed the hand 
of his sister, who
had been sitting beside her,
reading a book.  How they both
called his name, knowing
he was too small to run.
How is it we’re back here,
he asks her, and yet not
back? 

Day 496/Ceasefire Day 26

Tell me, do you love this land?
We love it in the freezing rain, the wind
that blows blood-soaked dust in our faces.
Tell me, do you fear for it?
We know it is alive under the rubble.
We know there are spirits breathing there.
We know there are thousands of buried seeds.
When you look at the ruined buildings,
what do you see?
I see a man digging to find
the broken bones of his children.
I see a child holding her father’s shirt,
all she has left of him.
I see two orphaned boys
carrying buckets of water
to their siblings. Heavy as the buckets are,
the boys quicken their pace.
And where are the dead?
Their corpses are piled
one over another
in crowded graveyards
where families are living in tents
amid bodies destroyed — first
by soldiers, then by the weather.
Tell me, how can you love this?
We love it because in summer
cool breezes blow in from the sea.
We love it for the fragrance
of jasmine and oranges
that we still can smell with our hearts,
more powerful than the stench of sewage,
of the cold decaying remains of our beloved.

Day 495/Ceasefire Day 25

A year ago, when the shelter was bombed,
the baby’s mother was killed.  His father,
his older siblings, escaped; but the father
could not go back to save the smallest one,
could not get back inside.  For a year, he
has grieved, has felt a part of himself
died, got left behind with the baby.
He did not know that another father,
escaping, heard the baby’s cries,
was near enough to take him
in his arms, bring him
to his wife, his children.  For all this year
they’ve raised him as their own.
Shared the little food they’ve had
with him, helped him walk, 
talk. And now they have found
each other, the two fathers.  Now
they have stood together, facing
each other, the one who couldn’t
save his son and the one
who saved him.  Now the baby’s
first father is watching, awed, as his child
walks toward him:  confused, not
knowing him at first, turning
toward the family he’s known
all these months.  Now the father
who saved this child looks
into the eyes of the first father,
tells him, he has always been yours,
he belongs to you. And the first father
takes the boy in his arms, kisses 
his head, tears streaming down
his face.  And this is a story
of a family who had nothing,
who shared the nothing they had
with a child they picked up
by chance, because there was no one else
to claim him;  and this is a story
of a man who grieved his own inability
to save his child, whose child
is restored to him by the goodness
of people he didn’t know, whom now
he will count as family, the child
uniting them, their bond
not severable.

Day 494/Ceasefire Day 24

We will remember these days
without bombing, these afternoons
when we worked together
lifting slabs of concrete, uncovering
a pot, a cushion, a child’s toy.
We will remember the child
whose toy this was, the aunt
who leaned against the cushion,
the mother stirring rice and lentils
in this pot.  We will remember
what it is like, if the bombing
starts again, to have whole mornings
of quiet, listening to the rain
beat against the panels of the tent.
We will remember our own
strength when it becomes clear
we will need to call on it
again.  We will remember
how we resisted.  Do they think
we will not resist?

Day 493/Ceasefire Day 23

What you remember
was that the children had been playing
in front of the house.  A clear
afternoon, warming a little, the children
having thrown their jackets
on the ground.  What you remember
was first the sound, then the whole
building shaking.  Shaking.  You ran
outside, calling their names.  Calling
for them to run, because you could feel
the shaking grow stronger, the black smoke
thicken.  Then you couldn’t see.  Then
you heard the sound of walls
collapsing.  You were standing
there where you’re standing
now, the children obscured
by the smoke, when you heard —
then saw — the front of the house
fall, as though the ground
had been taken from under it, as though
it were just a children’s tower of blocks.
You’ve come back now, after all
these months, to see 
how it fell on them, the children, 
how it crushed them there
in the midst of their game. What you remember
is their small intact jackets — one,
two, three — the jackets they’d tossed
to the side of the house, blue
blue and green, still
lying there on the ground
when the smoke cleared.

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.