Day 552

The children are running on the beach.
It’s a late afternoon in spring:
Golden light, nearly sunset,
the sky beginning to be streaked
with purple, blue.  There’s a man
doing jumping jacks
and two large dogs
racing in circles, kicking up sand
in their wild delight.  The tide
teases the children:  barefoot,
they leap over it and above it,
as though it were a great
moving rope.  Only miles
from here, warplanes
are dropping their vicious cargo.
The jumping man 
knows it.  The children
know it.  But for now,
for this moment, this beach
could be any beach, the sea
reaching this place
as it does any other.  For now
there is only this squealing, this
laughter, these joyous dogs.  These waves
moving rhythmically, predictably, in and out.

Day 551

Mira

She is standing now.  She
is beginning to walk on her own.  She’s
talking as clearly as she did 
before the bullet
lodged in her brain, this
four-year-old child shot
by a quad copter that aimed
right at her.  She’s walking
toward the doctor
who pulled her back into life
when she’d been triaged out.
The doctor who saw her react to pain
and thought, This one
might be possible to save.
So she was ferried back
into her mother’s arms, her tent,
into the air of this world, because
she still had the capacity
to feel pain. Because a doctor
believed she could save her.
Because she was strong and had
something in her that could
withstand, that could try
over and over and not
give up. (She opened her eyes,
she began to breathe.) All
she had learned
before, she’s relearning.
She stares into the astonished
tear-filled eyes
of the doctor
who saved her, and what
she says to her isn’t quite
thank you, but Look!
I painted my nails.

Day 550

In a fraction of a second
half your family is gone.
Your wife.  One
of two sons.  One
of two daughters.  As though
you’d all been looking
in a mirror, seen yourselves
reflected; and the mirror
suddenly shatters.  The children
still in their holiday clothes, the girls
with painted nails.  You open 
your eyes, look around, after someone —
a neighbor? — helps you out
from under the crushed wall
of your house.  Your living children
are walking through smoke and dust
half-blinded, dazed.  The two children
who have been killed
seem to be sleeping
under the rubble:  they don’t
make a sound; while the two
who are living have started
to whimper, to call out the names
of their sister, their brother.
To call for their mother.  You think
for a moment they’ll wake, stand.
Answer.

Day 549

from a photograph

The babies are lined up, side
by side, on a blanket
on the hospital floor.  At first glance
you think this could be a 
photograph of a daycare:
naptime, crowded but quiet
as the children sleep.  Then
you look more closely:  one of them
has a wound to the head; another
is covered so you can’t see
that his lower jaw
is missing; another is still
bleeding from his stomach.
All of them are  wearing
clothes someone dressed them in
this morning:  little striped shirts,
diapers decorated
with rows of baby ducks, pull-on  
cotton pants.  A few
have shoes.  Was this one
beginning to learn to walk?
This other one crawling?  Can
their parents, if they
have survived, remember the sound
of their cries?  Their giggles? Which,
all the rest of their lives now,
they will hear only
in memory.  And only imagine
how those small arms 
would have lengthened, where
those legs would have carried them … 

Day 548

A boy of eight or nine
is standing outside a school
where dozens of people are taking shelter.
More.  No place else to go.
Suddenly, an explosion.  The school is in flames.
The night is lit orange, the bomber planes
are still crossing the sky, having done 
what they came to do.  The boy stands,
unable to move.  He feels the heat,
hears the screams, sees people
beginning to pour out, running,
carrying children.  A man 
runs past him, two wailing children
in his arms.  He looks
at the boy, and the boy immediately
understands.  He holds out
his arms, takes the smaller child,
starts running with the father.  Where
are they going?  What will they find?
The boy looks, as he runs, into the eyes
of the child he is holding. Feels, 
in that moment, the child’s pain.
The father’s horror. Suddenly
his eight or nine years
have become a lifetime.  Whatever
boyhood was in him
is gone.  He knows 
only that he must keep running,
keep holding on tight
to this child. And he runs.  Runs.

Day 547

They were shot by snipers.
They were bombed while they slept.
Their bodies were shredded, their limbs
torn, their faces rendered
unrecognizable. They
were set on fire.  Stripped
naked, made to sit naked
on jagged rocks
in the cold, in the rain.  They
were questioned over and over,
told what to say, told
if they didn’t say it
their whole families would be murdered.
Their whole families were murdered.
Young children who played
In the street one day
lay dead the next day in the same street.
They were stabbed, kicked,
buried alive.  And yet they continued.
Yet they helped
one another.  If a family
lost its house, another family
took them in.  If a child
lost her parents, someone else
took care of her, saw her
as their own.  I am
speaking to you
as though these things
were finished, as though
they weren’t happening
now, but happened long ago.
I am telling you this
as though it were history, as though
you had asked me just now,
Tell me how we can understand
the beauty of this place
that our people rebuilt,
the goodness now
of our lives here?

Day 546

The children are given pens,
paper, a teacher
who tells them to draw
whatever they like.  Whole
new packets of colored pens,
neatly ordered, light green
next to dark green, turquoise,
sapphire.  They draw
spreading branches, deep grasses.
The sky.  They draw
what was their world, what isn’t
their world.  They draw flowers,
friendly dogs, bowls
heaped with fruit.  They draw
what they need and can’t have,
what they miss and what
they used to live with.  They draw
as they drew before the bombings,
before the deaths, before 
the rubble.  They are
remaking their neighborhoods, 
their families, their lives. Their energy
returns to them as they
draw, flows
as the vibrant ink flows
from their pens onto the paper.

Day 545

A mother lays her two-week old
daughter in a tiny cradle.  Sleep
peacefully, little one, she
tells her.  She has
bathed her, diapered her,
dressed her, covered her.
The older children
are asleep already; only this one
had been awake, her small
perfect eyes looking up, up.
Up at the night sky, the stars,
beyond the flap of the tent.
Then the bombing comes,
the relentless explosions,
the smoke.  My children
are on fire! the mother
screams, doing
whatever she can
to extinguish the flames.
In the end, of all
her children, only one
remains.  The infant
gone, who lived
two weeks, gone
before her perfect eyes
could find their focus.
Before she could smile
at her mother, who now
must bury her. Only the stars
remain untouched, shine
from their infinitely distant
points in the sky
as though nothing of this
had never happened.

Day 544

from a photograph

This sister wanted to be a writer.
This sister wanted to be an artist.
Now the writer writes
about her sister’s killing — crushed
by the wall of the room
she’d been sleeping in.  Now
the artist is dead, who drew,
days before the bombing,
a tree bare of leaves, a brilliant sun
shining behind its naked
branches, numbers
naming the year to come.
New year that could have been
filled with possibilities, now
carved forever in stone
over the grave of the girl
who slowly, carefully,
penciled its numbers.  How
can she be gone, who lit up
the house like the sun
she drew?  How
could her vibrant
thirteen-year-old body
be bare of leaves?

Day 543

What do you ask of us now,
our martyred brother, our brother
who wrote poems, who
loved to run, our brother
who fed roving hungry dogs
half the food he could find
for himself, our brother
who sat on a rock last night
and sang for us, sang
for the little ones?  Only
that you remember me.  Only
that our stories be recorded.
Only that you remember
I cherished you,
that the songs I sang,
the words I wrote,
were for my people. That I loved
sunlight and warmth and walking
in late afternoon.  Only
that you remember I lived,
that my footprints, which
disappear now in the rain,
the bombings, will be absorbed
by the earth, will accompany you
as you continue our struggle.