Day 580

In memory of Yahya Sobaih,
Journalist killed by Israeli airstrike

Hours after your little daughter
came into this world,
you were taken from it,
assassinated from the air
with others who lay near you
on the hard ground — you
wearing the clothes you wore
in the picture you took of yourself
holding your child, your princess.
You greeted her in those clothes
and greeted your death in the same clothes.
You prayed to take joy in her living
and did for a few short hours.
Now your child will have
no father.  Now her birthday
will be your death day.  Now
when she celebrates the day
she was born, she will grieve it
as the day you died.  Now her mother
has been forced to hold
her deepest joy in one hand
and her deepest sorrow
in the other.  Tell me — which one
weighs more?

Day 579

Her older cousin is teaching her
to count in English.  The child
is five.  One two three four five
fingers (still there).  Enough
to get all the way to ten.
Two hands, two arms, two legs.
Two eyes.  One nose.  One
mouth (still there). Five
sisters.  Three brothers.  But
didn’t there used to be more?
One killed in front of them
by a sniper.  Two killed
early on in the genocide,
when their uncle’s house
was bombed (three
cousins, one uncle, one aunt,
one grandfather). And arms:
What about Hammed,
who has only one?  Or Fatima,
who used to have two — then
none.  How many times
have we eaten today?  There’s
a number called Zero. Zero.
Let’s make marks with this stick
in the dust.  A mark
for Zero: a circle
that’s empty.  Nothing inside it.

Day 578

Who is your mother, small girl
wandering in the dust, your head
bleeding, arm bleeding, tired
and gaunt and dazed. Who
is your father?  What’s
your name?  Do you
know your name? Where
did you start
walking from?  And for how long?
When was the last time you ate?
Drank water that wasn’t
contaminated?  How
can we help you? How
old are you?  Two and a half?
Three?  Can you tell us
something about where
you were living? Will you
let us help you? Let us
clean the blood
from your cheek, your
tangled hair?  Let us tie
these old clothes as a tourniquet
around your arm, to stop it
bleeding? Is there a bullet
lodged in it?  Can we take you
to a hospital?  Look
for your parents?  Try
and find you something
you could eat?

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?