Day 577

Every day his father
visits his grave.  Sometimes
he brings a book
or an article
to read to his son, as he did
in the old days – go
to stand in the doorway
of his son’s room, tell him
here’s something I think
will interest you….Other days
his father brings him news
of the family:  Your friend Samir
was martyred along with
his brothers;  your aunt Sahar
is feeling a little better.  Your mother
still cries every day.  The father
comes, sits, sometimes
turns on his phone so his son
can listen to a little music.
I know this was the music
you loved, he tells him
tenderly.  If you’d had
more than your fourteen years
you might have had
time to play, might have
become the musician
you wanted to be.  There
the father’s voice trails off
into sobs, into the sound
of drones, into the wordlessness
from the grave beside him.

Day 576

Where will we go
to find food
when there is none?  What
will the earth
be able to give us?
You send the older children
to pick weeds. 
Once you planted vegetables
in the garden of your house.
Now there is no garden, no
house, and the soil that was there
is dust, laced with poison
from bombs.  Still,
you survive,  The younger children
make sand cakes, dirt cakes,
decorate them with stones,
pretend they can eat them.
The older children come back
to the tent, their arms full
of grasses. You stand
over a fire you’ve improvised,
stir something that looks
like a soup with a stick
you have whittled so it looks
like a spoon.  One more day.

Day 575

This is the market 
of broken dreams.  Here
is a young girl’s dream
of becoming a poet. Here 
is another girl’s dream of traveling
to India, watching dancers dance
in their colorful saris.  This market —
unlike any other market here —
is full to bursting: purveyors
of broken dreams (is this,
too, a dream?) calling out
their wares. Here is a mother’s dream
of seeing her infant son
heal from his wounds,
have his arms and legs
whole again, as they were
only days ago.  Here
is a brother’s dream
of his older brother
coming back to life, telling him
the secret that now
he will never tell anyone.

Day 574

You have no wood, so you gather
your own old shoes
to burn for cooking.  Shoes
that carried you to the university,
Shoes that walked to your uncle’s
house, your grandfather’s.  Shoes
you were wearing when you first
fell in love, when you wrote
your first poem, when you took
your first child outside
for the first time.  The canvas
tops, the rubber soles
burn slowly. They give off
a foul smell.  You have time
to remember:  these
were the shoes you wore
to see a movie you loved.  These
were the shoes you wore
to hear a lecture
by the professor you admired,
murdered shortly into the genocide.
These were the shoes
you wore to search 
for your mother’s body,
your sister’s, your two
younger brothers’, the day
your house was bombed.
Now they are burning
so you can cook rice
for your children, warm the beans
that are almost gone, even warm
your own hands a little
as you stand outside your tent,
smoke from the shoes
rising into the troubled sky.

Day 573

Of all her children, only one remains,
and that one is in the hospital,
a serious wound to his stomach. 
They were all in the kitchen
and then there was nothing:  no
walls. No stove, no cups or plates.
The youngest had been playing
on the floor.  The older ones
sitting, talking.  Their father
trying to read something
by the small light of his phone.
Tell me:  how does a whole life
disappear in an instant?  How
does a mother stand up,
clearing the things that collapsed
on top of her, and start looking
for her children?  This one
in her pink dress, blown in half.
That one without arms or legs.
How does she count them?  How
will she bury them?  And how
will she keep this one living child
alive, with no gauze, no pain medicine, no
antibiotics?  The cans of food
they’d been storing,
nearly used up.

Day 572

She went to the first open pharmacy,
the one nearest to where she was staying,
to see if they had formula
for her infant.  None.  Two other
pharmacies told her the same.
She walked home, thinking
how she could feed him, how
to keep him alive.  Her milk,
sparse to begin with, long since
dried up.  No water available,
no way to assuage his hunger.
Maybe her friend, whose baby
was killed only days
ago, who had been nursing him?
Would she still have milk?
Could she ask a woman
who had no child anymore
to feed her child?  These
were the thoughts running
through her mind
as she walked, as
she approached her tent,
listening to the sound —
under the buzz of drones, 
of low-flying planes — 
of her baby crying.  His cries
still vigorous despite having
no milk; his cries — consoling
and wrenching to her
at once — telling the world
Are you listening?  I’m hungry,
I exist and I want to remain alive.

Day 571

There was a place by the sea
where we sat and talked.  There
were pastries, strong coffee, tables
far enough apart that we could
hear each other well
over the sound of the tide, the ebb
and flow of voices.  We would sit outside
when the weather was warm, our hair
damp and salty afterward.  Now
the café is gone, the tables
are gone, there are no
pastries anywhere.  You, too,
friend of so many years,
are gone.  What remains
is the memory of our long
unbroken conversation, the thread
we’d drop and pick up, drop
again and pick up. What remains
is the salt air.  The sea, its rhythm
predictable.  Eternal?

Day 570

She was your sister, a year younger.
Everyone asked if you were twins:
you looked so much alike.  Every night
you lay together in the dark,
telling stories, sharing secrets,
talking about your friends, your crushes.
Every morning you’d trade clothes,
ask her, Can I wear your blue shirt?
Should I wash your red sweater?
Every day you’d walk together
to school; then – when there was
no school — from the tent
to the place where you
could get water.  Then
from another tent to another place
for water.  Still, at night,
your voices accompanied
by the sound of drones, you’d lie
on your blanket together, whispering,
giggling, sometimes crying.  Where
is she now?  Where did the bombing
take her?  Her body so shredded
it couldn’t be found.  Only
a few strands of hair
so like your own, you thought
for a moment it was you
who had been killed.

Day 569

Your brother has lost both his arms.
One closer to the shoulder
than the other.  He is so thin
you can see all his ribs.
You remember how, when
he was little, you’d
pick him up when he stretched
both his arms to ask you, before
he knew how to ask you in words.
You remember the first time
he caught a ball you threw
for him, a big ball, light enough
for him to carry, his arms
reaching all the way
around it.  Every night now
you cry for him, though your father
has told you, Don’t cry, we’re lucky
your brother is still alive!  But you
want your brother back
with his arms, the brother
who put his hand in yours
when he was afraid, the brother
who drew horses and rainbows
for you when you were sick,
the brother who learned
to throw a ball far, farther away
than the look in his eyes,
than whatever he cries out at in his dreams.

Day 568

You wake because you have to.
You had a home, a husband, 
parents, four children.
Now your husband has been killed,
your parents are dead of illness
and starvation, and two
of your children lie
in their graves, their bodies
shattered.  Maybe they’re whole
again, you think.  Maybe the bomb
that took them should have taken
the rest of us.  Then we wouldn’t
be hungry, sick, frightened.
You allow yourself
to think that for a moment,
the first moment you lie 
looking up at the still-dark sky
through places where the tent
is ripped. But then
you stir, slowly, out
from under your blanket.  You
sit up, look at your two
living children, still
asleep. Still breathing
almost peacefully.  You know
the wearying tasks of day
will begin again, and you
will do them again because
you have to, because
you are their mother, because
they need you to feed them.
To pretend one more day
you can keep them safe
despite the destruction you know
is lurking around you, is lying
in wait for you.  Which may
or may not come for you.