Day 512/Ceasefire Day 42

Iftar

On top of the ruins of their home
a man and a woman have placed
a small table and two simple chairs.
Under a string of fairy lights — electrified
who knows how? — they are having
a meal.  They are breaking a fast.
Let all who think defeat has come
look hard at this scene:
they are eating together,
they are eating (who
knows what?) under the darkening
sky, and speaking
together.  Let all
who think they should be afraid
take in this scene.  Over 
their bombed-out house
this first Ramadan evening,
they are living their lives.  The rest
will come later.

Day 511/Ceasefire Day 41

The girl was walking to get water
for her family.  There was
no one else:  father dead,
mother sick, younger brothers
not strong enough to carry back
heavy buckets.  She was walking,
stepping over piles of rock,
now and then slipping in deep
mud.  Walking, carrying
buckets.  Filled them.  Turned
to walk back.  Rain.  The buckets
swaying, overflowing, precious
water spilled on the ground,
useless.  That’s when
the sniper spotted her,
trapped her in his crosshairs,
shot.  That’s when
she fell.  Bleeding.  The buckets
too, full of holes. Rain
raining down on her body,
the buckets emptying. 
Emptying. No way to separate
blood from water.

Day 510/Ceasefire Day 40

The boy was found by a stranger.
Stranger?  Someone
who hadn’t known him before,
who learned somehow
that the boy’s parents
had been killed.  When?  The boy
was too young to know.  All
he knew was that they were gone.
Gone.  And that he was hungry.
Cold.  And all the stranger —
stranger? — knew 
was that there was a child
younger than three, perhaps;
unable to talk (from trauma?
because of his age?) who needed
someone to take him,
and the stranger 
took him. Kept him.  Cared for him.
And this is a story
of how, when people have nothing
or next to nothing, they can be willing
to share it with a child who has
even less.  And this is a story
about the way love
is a form of resistance.

Day 509/Ceasefire Day 39

How many days were you
under the rubble?
I think it was two.  Maybe three.
Day and night were not
that different.  Everything
was dark.  No sky
between blocks of concrete.
Nothing.
How many kilometers
between where you went afterward
and the home you fled?
Home?  Sixteen kilometers.
Seventeen. Thousands, millions,
if you’re asking about what
I had there. A home.  More
than a home.  An infinity
of kilometers.  How many
people did you lose?
Do you mean family?  Friends?
Neighbors?  How many people?
Sixty, seventy thousand.  More.
We could count the ones
who are still breathing but
who wouldn’t really say
they were alive.  Alive
is different.  We could double
those numbers and never
arrive at the end.
What are you doing
now?  Lifting one stone.
setting it aside, then
lifting another.  Breathing.
Planting anything green.
No, tell me: what
are you doing now?
Counting.  Counting.

Day 508/Ceasefire Day 38

Overnight, three small children
freeze to death.  No house, no
roof, no warmth but the warmth
of their parents’ bodies, bodies
also fending off the cold.
February.  Rain.  They had come
this far, little ones born
to the wail of drones, lullabies
of falling, shattering; little ones
whose skin was intimate with dust
and the coarseness of blankets
too light, too worn
to shelter them.  They had come
all this way, carried
in the weakened arms
of their mothers.
Back to where they began,
back to what they had 
been carried away from.
All this way, through months
of horror: only to feel their bodies
shut down, organ by tiny organ,
until there was nothing left
in them to resist.  Until
it was death that took them
from their mothers’ arms.
Carried them off.

Day 507/Ceasefire Day 37

Come with me, the girl says to her brother.
I’ll show you something beautiful.
Her brother takes her hand.  They’re stepping
over fallen concrete, jagged stones; careful
of what’s there – unexploded weapons?
Walls that might collapse, so tenuously
standing?  Come with me, she tells him.
They are climbing, climbing.  At last
they get to a place where she tells him
to look straight ahead.  What 
are we looking at?  he asks her. All
I see is more of what we’ve 
been climbing over.  No, she says.
Look!  can’t you see the fields
of flowers?  the planted rows
of peppers, zucchini? Can’t you see
the school with its playground, 
its windows reflecting everything back?
The children running?  Her brother
stands, squints.  Puzzled.  All I can see
is what we just saw, he says to her.
She holds his hand more tightly,
looks into his eyes.  This is what will be,
she says to him, knowing he doesn’t
understand.  Maybe you’ll see better
if you close your eyes.

Day 506/Ceasefire Day 36

At twelve, she’s lost everything.
Father dead, mother dead, siblings.
Best friend dead.  Other friends. Teachers.
It’s cold and rainy and she has
just one shirt, one pair of jeans.
No jacket.  The shirt short-sleeved.
Has it been so long
since she’s spoken to anyone
that she doesn’t remember
how?  How
to tell a story?  Father dead.  Mother
dead.  Cold, she says. Hungry.  House
bombed.  Nothing, she says.
Vast uncharted spaces in her mind
between one memory and another.
Rubble spaces.  Dust spaces. Nothing,
she repeats, wanting
perhaps to be understood.
Nothing left?  Nothing
more to say? Nothing
to look for?  Nothing
to hope for?  Nothing
in her stomach, nothing
in her heart?

Day 505/Ceasefire Day 35

What do you tell the children
now that you’ve walked all the way back
to where you were when everything began
and there’s no home waiting for you,
not even the promised trailer, not even the tent
you left behind in the south?  Broken anyway,
you told them; for weeks, it let in the cold, the rain.
What do you tell them when they ask
for friends who played with them in the street
only a day before the bombing?  What do you say
when they ask for their school, their teachers?
Their questions are the edge of an abyss
you don’t want to look down at. They echo
for you through the night, stand waiting for you
when you open your eyes in the morning.
What can you tell the children,
who ask for the past, the future?
Around you the fragrance of wildflowers
competes with the stench of bodies 
rotting too far beneath the rubble
to dig out. Each body a cry.  A story.

Day 504/Ceasefire Day 34

Tomatoes, favas, white potatoes, kale.
Zucchini, red potatoes, chile peppers, avocados.
Bell peppers. Lettuces. How did they grow?
How were they protected? How
did they survive the fetid air, 
the dust, the smoke, the contamination?
How did they come to life
with no water, foul water, salt water?
And who tended them?  Who harvested them?
Now they’re displayed on stands
at a market the people have organized.
Now people survey them, take them
in their hands, hold them to their faces
so they can smell them, feel them
against their skin.  Beyond the market, 
ruins of the city:  but that’s not
|what they’re looking at now, the ones
who walk among these stands,
looking at vegetables, thinking
of how they’ll cook them,
eat them.  The grayness of bulldozed
lives, fallen buildings, crushed dreams
is near, but it is not everything:  everything
now includes these offerings of the earth
and of resistance. These ripened promises.

Day 503/Ceasefire Day 33

The child is sleeping.  Her mother
moves quietly around her.  Though the tent
is small, it holds everything
they have:  a few pairs of shoes,
two jackets, some cans of food.
The child, whose brother is playing
outside with a friend, sleeps deeply,
peacefully. The one arm she still has
is wrapped around a stuffed blue dog
that somehow, miraculously,
has survived bombings, displacements,
driving rain.  Her mother
straightens the light blanket, brushes
her daughter’s hair with her hand.
Maybe today she is in less pain.
Maybe today she has made a step
toward accepting the arm that is missing.
Maybe today, when she wakes
from her nap, the air will be filled
with the smell of flowers
beginning to blossom, the late afternoon
will be peaceful, her brother
will hold her one hand that is there,
will walk with her outside, will take her
to look for jasmine, cyclamen, poppies.