Day 530

For a short while you returned.
Eight weeks!  It was like
the dream of return
your grandmother held
as long as she lived, until
the bomb came for her one night
in her bed.  For a short while 
you surveyed the jagged stones
that had been your house.
Held one, then another,
remembering rooms,
floors, walls of bookshelves.
For a short while
you held the dream
that return was possible.  Was
granted.  You piled
one stone on another,
imagined tables, chairs.  Long
afternoons by the window, watching
your children play
in the garden you’d plant again,
safe behind the fence you’d rebuild.
Now you’ve been told to leave
once more.  Now you turn, call
your children’s names.  Slip
one small stone into
your pocket.  Press it
into your hand. 

Day 529

(from a photograph and a story by Rasha Abou Jalal on Dropsite, after Israel shattered the ceasefire)

The eight year old girl Siwar
sits in a faded armchair
that survived months of bombardment
outside what must have been her home.
Gaza City.  Ruins behind her. She wears
a red and brown sweater, jeans,
stained white running shoes with pink laces.
Siwar has long fingers, graceful hands,
a soft smile.  Her brown hair is thin, likely
from malnutrition after months 
of starvation.  Maybe her family
had taken refuge in the south, walked back
to their home after the Ceasefire?  This night,
in the middle of the night, the bombing resumed.
The sky filled with planes, the night
filled with chaos.  Noise.  This morning
Siwar is dead, who yesterday
played outside her house.  Dead
with eleven members of her family.  Dead
with her pink shoelaces, her red
and brown sweater, her long fingers
that might have played some instrument,
that might have held a pen, a paintbrush,
that might have grasped the limb of a tree
she might have climbed to look out
on the world, the city beyond her, the sea.

Day 528/Ceasefire Day 58

And the cattle have also been killed.
Gentle cows who grazed in the fields.
Children who sat and milked them, 
their parents who taught them.
Others who led them up and down
from the pastures:  north pasture, south pasture,
morning, then evening. Light
changing, growing golden, purple,
as quietly they led the cows at the end
of day to barns they had built.  This
happened and happened. 
Slow cows, lowering their heads.  Their deep
sounds a lament.  The sweet
grass gone, the children gone, the parents
gone.  Cows who wasted and died
of starvation, for lack
of water. Cows who died in the bombings. Why,
tell me, would anyone want to murder a cow
except to deprive a farmer of his living?
Farmer who was murdered anyway.  Children
of the farmer, murdered anyway. The land
also murdered: what was grass,
blown to dust. Where barns stood:
broken stones. More stones.

Day 527/Ceasefire Day 57

Why would this man
not have a right
to rebuild his house?  The one
that stood before the bombing
had been built by him:  months
of setting one board
against another, wiring, laying
the pipes.  All his labor
destroyed in a single moment;
but he and his family escaped.
Survived!  Why would he be denied
materials now?  Why now?
By night he digs through the rubble,
scavenges, finds whatever 
he can redeem of the original
house:  a pipe here, a handful
of screws.  Who has the right
to deprive him of this, even to tell him
it’s futile, the bombs
will come again?  Will take down
the work of his determined hands.
Who will tell him this
as he hammers one wall to another,
imagines how they will live
there, how their days will unfold?

Day 526/Ceasefire Day 56

Who will tell this child
that her baby brother is dead?
Every day she dressed him,
every day she held him.  Every day
she wrapped his small body
in a blanket, in her jacket.  Who
will tell her it wasn’t enough? 
Who will let her touch his cold
skin, that could not withstand
this winter night?  Why is it not
spring yet?  Why are there no
tents, no promised rv’s?  Why
wasn’t this baby born later,
earlier, whenever there might have been
some chance of his outlasting the chill?
Who will tell this child
that all she did for her baby brother
could never have saved him?  Never?

Day 525/Ceasefire Day 55

The boy is running across stones
that used to be the front yard of his house.
His mother tended flowers, vegetables.
every day she would come inside
with armfuls of color, green or yellow
squash.  The boy is running,
whispering the names
of his friends, looking for them
under stones, as though they are only playing 
some hiding game.  He sits 
on a concrete slab, takes a piece of bread
out of the pocket of his jacket, breaks it
in two, stretches his right hand
as though there is someone to take it.
Whispers a name.  Whispers, Here.  Eat.
He leans, fills the space, takes a bite
from the proffered half slice, whispers
a few more words to his friend
who isn’t there, who will never
be there, whose name,
like the names of all the others,
haunts the empty air.

Day 524/Ceasefire Day 54

In the house, in the streets, in the field
where once there were rows of flowers,
there are unexploded land mines.
Step on one by mistake,
it’s the end:  a small personal bomb,
reminder of months of bombs
that fell from the sky.  They have stalled
the food trucks, they've stopped
the flow of electricity.  You’re
hungry, thirsty, weary
of being afraid, weary of looking around
to see where the drones are, 
the snipers, the soldiers.  And now
your children play in the field
where once their school stood
and you stand where your house
stood, watching them, your eyes
combing the dust for a glint
of metal, monitoring every move
of their small feet that have survived
thus far …

Day 523/Ceasefire Day 53

All the schools are destroyed,
and in this they are indistinguishable
from the houses, the hospitals, the mosques.
If everything is rubble, where can this child learn? 
Two houses times seventy thousand houses
equals nothing. Nothing is what remains. 
And if x equals the lives of a single family, can
she multiply that by the sum of families
totally wiped out?  And divide it then
by heartbreak, by longing, by the number
of tears that could fill an empty well? All
this child wants is to go to school, but where?
Where can she study the algebra of pain?
How can she learn to measure the quantity
of blood absorbed by the ground?  The ounces
of fear?  The degrees of hunger?

Day 522/Ceasefire Day 52

for Mahmoud Khalil

I am thinking now about a man
walking to his apartment on a March night,
his wife walking with him.  Fishing
for his keys, opening the door — his wife
eight months pregnant — when suddenly
there are men pushing their way inside ahead of them.
Their unborn baby, nearly ready for birth,
shudders inside the womb, feels the fear,
the horror.  I’m thinking about the man’s words
at the protest last spring: firm, gentle.  Stop
the genocide, stop the killing of children.
Stop the complicity of the university, 
the government, the corporations.  Stop. Stop now.
They take him away.  They take him somewhere
unknown, a prison, an undisclosed location; his wife,
his lawyer, aren’t told.  Stop the killing
of children, the killing of babies, he’s
thinking.  He’s thinking about his child,
unborn first child, alive, growing
well, nearly ready to come
into this world after so many thousands
of children have been killed.
The city night cold, early March,
his wife shocked and alone inside the apartment,
the baby stirring, then not stirring, then stirring again.

Day 521/Ceasefire Day 51

How did you make it through, the man
asks his friend.  They are sitting together
on a slab of concrete, watching the sunset.
The sky streaked with red, gold.  The man
who has asked the question looks
at his friend:  he has grown thin, has lost
his hair, his hands shake a little.  He too
has changed.  The sky is darkening, sapphire
replaces some of the red. Make it through?
the friend answers.  His answer is only
a question.  The man who has asked
the question lays his hand
over his friend’s shaking hand.  He knows
the losses go beyond flesh, beyond hair.
Four of his friend’s children lie 
under the rubble.  His mother, his sister.
Make it through? the friend says again,
as though to the air, the sky
where now a few stars have begun to appear.