Day 567

Tell me, do people feel pain
when a bomb falls on them?
The child, who is five, is asking her mother.
In another place, in a different time,
the child might ask if an apple feels pain
when you bite it, if the sky
feels pain when it’s covered by clouds.
Last night the tent where the child’s
friend was living was bombed.  The child
learned about it when she walked
just now, with her older brother,
to find her friend.  Nothing.  Shredded
limbs. Whose? The tent fallen, like a shroud
lying on top of everything. The child knew
her friend had tripped 
on a rock some days ago,
scraped her knee.  Had cried,
loud and hard, until someone
came, washed her knee, held her
until she was calmer.
It still hurts a lot, she said:  to
no one. To everyone.
The child is standing now in her tent.
Her mother looks at her, puts a hand
on the child’s head.  Now will her knee
get better? she asks. 

Day 566

in memory of Fatima Hassouna

You were murdered for telling
what happened.  Murdered (with
all of your family) for showing it,
murdered for your photographs.  Even
amid the bombing, amid hospitals
collapsing, amid children
bleeding into the dust, you went on
taking your pictures, went on
saying in words and in images,
this was.  This happened.  This
was a life lived by a child, this
was what we did, what we saw,
what we studied, cared about, lost.
These were the ways we fought.  These
were our hands, our eyes.  Who
murders a twenty-five year old woman
(with her whole family)
because she took pictures?  Who
murders two hundred journalists —
more! — because they are telling
what is?  Today, Fatima, I heard
from a friend, younger
than you were, who lives
not far from where you lived.
I will not give up, she wrote. 
Every day is a struggle
not to give up.  She won’t.
You didn’t.  Do you know
what courage that compels me
to find within myself?

Day 565

The members of the team
have all been killed.  Their coach
has been killed, 
and the building 
they practiced in, shiny
floor of their gym, destroyed.
The field they played on
is nothing but stones,
charred grasses, dust.
Here’s where a goalpost
was; here was the other.
Here the goalie 
made his startling plays.
Here was the place
far from the goal
where the team’s star player
kicked hard and direct
and scored the game’s
last goal.  How
could he have known
it would be the last goal
he’d score forever?  Last
game they’d play, last time
the team would walk 
off the field
together, arms
around each other’s
shoulders, sun
setting in the distance,
turning the field
golden. Strong athletic
young bodies golden.  

Day 564

When their house was bombed
all the girl carried out 
was what she’d been holding:
A notebook.  A pen.  There she was,
still alive, her parents and siblings,
incredibly, alive, watching their house (from
the distance they stood at)
burn, collapse.  Everything
gone but the things in their hands:
A stuffed bear.  A key
(grabbed from a shelf)
that would never again
open anything.  But she
had her notebook.  She
— from the shelter
they moved to, then
another shelter, then
a tent, then a different
tent in a different place —
cherished the notebook, wrote
in it daily. Documented
displacements. Losses. 
Grief. The drones
overhead, the hunger,
the moments of laughter,
the dark conversations.  The notebook
became her friend, her sister
when, after months,
her sister was killed.
The notebook became the certainty
that she was a writer, that
writing would be
what carried her, what kept her
whole and living.

Day 563

This father is standing beside his child’s
broken body.  Just this morning
the child took his first steps, walked
and fell, stood up, fell again, stood again
and walked almost to his brother.
Now his body is shattered, open wounds
on his legs that had only this morning
found their strength.  Now he lies
in a hospital bed, his father waiting to see
if a surgeon can put these legs
back together.  The pain medication
isn’t enough:  he’s been crying,
but now he’s quiet, his eyes
open, he’s staring up
at the lights on the hospital ceiling.
At his father’s face. At the surgeon,
showing his father the x-rays,
telling him how he will try
to rejoin bone to bone, muscle
to muscle, so the boy will begin,
one day again, perhaps not long
from now, to stand.  To walk
all the way to his brother.

Day 562

Here is an x-ray of this child’s hand:
see below the knuckles
something that looks
like an inverted rocket, like a toy 
rocket a child might make
from paper and rubber bands, 
to launch with a friend
outside the house.  But this
is no toy.  This
is a bullet, launched
by a sniper who fixed the child
in his crosshairs, who targeted
this hand.  Hand intended
to hold a pen, a paintbrush,
a ball, a whittling knife.  Hand
intended to hold another’s hand,
to hold an infant, a spoon, a steering wheel,
a phone, a doorknob. And even 
if the bullet can be removed,
what will heal this child
of the memory of pain, what
will blur for him 
the thin dividing line 
between childhood
and a different awareness?

Day 561

The metal pots and pans in the tent
were melted by fire
from the bomb’s explosion.
The canvas tent
lay collapsed in a pile of ash,
melted. Even the bones 
of the children were melted.
Nothing to know them by,
nothing to recognize.
Their mother lay with them,
melted.  A woman from a nearby tent
told of the children playing
the night before: running
between tents,
kicking a ball.  They had walked
to see family; had eaten
what little there was to eat,
lay down in their tent to sleep.
Now they will need no graves.
Now their ravaged bodies 
will be absorbed
by dust.  Now there is nothing
to know them by.  They lived.
They played.  They laughed.
Their mother held them
as they slept.  Far
from where they were burned,
the ball the children had played with
had rolled away.
Was whole.  Would be found now
by other children.

Day 560

Eighteen minutes 
to evacuate the hospital:
You’re sitting with your father —
elderly, frail, wounded by shrapnel,
barely conscious.  Eighteen
minutes to pull 
the iv’s, eighteen minutes
to lift him carefully 
out of his bed, wrap blankets
around him to keep him
warm, make certain 
his open wounds
are covered by 
whatever there is
to cover them. 
Eighteen minutes
to swing him 
gently onto your back,
run cautiously
down the hospital stairs,
surrounded by so many
others doing
the same. Your father
moaning, struggling
to breathe.  You,
remembering how
he used to carry you
on his strong shoulders
through streets abundant
with gardens, all the way
to the sea.

Day 559

A child in a wheelchair
is rolling it with his arms, rolling it
on the rocky, dusty ground, when suddenly
fire falls from the sky, ignites
the boy.  The boy is burning alive
in his wheelchair and no one
can stop it, no one
can get near enough.  A woman tries
throwing a blanket to quell
the flames, but it doesn’t, the blanket
falls to the ground in the wind
from the fire. The boy
is screaming, screaming
the names of his mother, his father.
At last the flames, having nothing
more to consume, abate.  Those
witnessing can approach, can
see what happened.  The child
sits slumped in his wheelchair.
His body charred, his face
unrecognizable.  A man
touches the chair, metal arms
still hot.  Why is this chair
intact and the boy
dead? the man
cries out to nothing.
To everything. Wheelchair 
that had held this child
since the amputations, wheelchair
that has become his grave.

Day 558

Everyone around her is bringing her food
so she can make milk for her baby.  They
are not family, not even old friends — all
of them have just planted their tents
in that dusty field,  everyone displaced
from somewhere else — but she
has no family except her three
older children, and her husband — 
their father — was killed when the baby
was four months in the womb. Now
they are helping her try to keep this one alive.
It’s chilly, windy.  Two of the older children
lie on either side of the baby, blankets
under and over them, to keep her warm.
The mother is holding the two year old,
who’s crying now because he’s hungry,
That’s when the women come in 
from the neighboring tents
with rice, cooked lentils, freshly baked bread,
even an orange!  She feeds her two year old
first, then — because the women insist
they’ll bring more — takes a large portion
of lentils and rice for herself.  Where
did they get this?  She wonders.
Are they depriving themselves? She looks
at her baby, who has opened her eyes
now, stares up at her sisters.
There will be milk enough
for you today, her mother tells her,
warming the cold tiny hands 
between her own.