Day 634

for Ahmed D.


Your streets are nothing
but dust and echoes. 
A belt of fire
circles the tents.
You write, flames
raging around you.
What else to do? Nowhere
you can go, nowhere 
to escape this.  In her womb,
your wife carries your child.
The first died under the rubble.
Now this one grows, protected —
if anything can be protected —
from mercilessness, brutality.
You tell me the simple foods
you want to eat:  Chicken.
Bread. Rice.  How could it seem
so impossible to dream
of eating such simple foods?
In a tree stripped of summer leaves
by the bombings, one bird
is singing.  He sits
on a naked branch,
his small throat pulsing
with song. See, we resist!
he reports to the sky, clear
for a moment of smoke
and flames.  

Day 633

You can see every one of her ribs. 
You can see where they spread open
like wings, where they make
a kind of bowl for the soft tissue
of her belly.  You can see
how there is nothing
beneath her taut skin but bone.
You can see how little she had
to lose.  Was she an infant?
Months old? A year? 
Difficult to know.
You can imagine her body
as a cage: her organs
small fluttering birds
trapped inside.  Now
she has wasted away.
Wasted away in the heat
of summer.  Wasted away
without clothing.  Wasted
away for want of milk.
Her wasted growing.  Her wasted
looking.  Listening.  Who
would make an instrument 
now of her bones?  A harp?
A fiddle?  Who will play
what ought to have been
the song of her soul?

Day 632

You’re walking to the aid hub 
at two in the morning.  Others
walk with you.  Someone is using
the flashlight from his phone
to guide you.  You’re walking. 
Running.  Then walking again.
Then hiding.  You pass a body.
Another body.  Six bodies
bleeding out on the ground.
The man with the flashlight
bleeds out on the ground. His phone
still radiating light.  You keep running
now, you don’t even pick up
the phone.  The ground is red.  Soaked.
Injured people are walking
behind you. Staggering.  Slow.
You want to help them but soldiers
are firing now. More people bleeding
from head wounds and chest wounds.
Are you anywhere close to the place
where you might get a small box of food
for your children?  A few ounces of bulghur?
A can of beans?

Day 631

from a photograph


Outside the hospital, a man and a woman
are tenderly holding the body
of an infant who died
from malnutrition.  Had they been
taking her to the hospital
for treatment — walked there
from wherever they’d been —
and arrived too late?  The infant
is wrapped in a white
shroud, maybe a sheet or a pillow case.
You can see, in the photograph,
the top of her head: perfectly
formed, a few strands of hair.
She is weeks old at most.
The man and the woman —
are they her parents? Grandparents?
The man has some gray in his hair.
The woman’s face is weary.  Weary
from grief? Starvation? Twenty months
of brutality, and, before that, years?
They hold the infant with such
tenderness, their love
and their mourning are in their fingers.
Both are weeping.  The infant’s life
is dissolving now into poisoned air, 
into toxic water.  Dissolving
as they walked, ran, carrying her.
Now she belongs to the earth.
Now she is only a name
and a memory.  Their hands
learning her by heart, so as
not to forget.

Day 630

What you miss
is the life you had.  You woke,
went to class, stopped
at a café with friends.
You came home.  You ate,
studied, turned off the light.
Your grandfather sat in the front room,
reading.  Your mother
brought him tea in a porcelain cup
painted with roses.  Your father
drew blueprints for houses
he was going to design.  Your brothers
squabbled; you asked them
to be quiet, you were trying to sleep.
What you miss now is the sound
of their squabbling, the sound
of your grandfather calling
for more tea, your parents
saying goodnight.  Do your brothers
argue with each other
in their graves, disagree
about which soccer team
should win the championship?
Do their faces that were red with blood
the last time you saw them
grow red with anger
as they continue their argument?

Day 629

You tell me you loved rainy weather
but now you can’t bear it.
When your house was destroyed
your whole family moved to a tent.  The tent
is flimsy, has a hole
in what should be the roof. Lets
the cold in.  Lets the rain in.
I am thinking about your infant,
how sometimes. when he’s sleeping,
the rain pours in and soaks him.
I am thinking of how it’s possible
to keep him warm and dry.  I think
of you, smiling at me
when I ask you that.  It’s not,
it’s not possible, you tell me,
there’s no way to keep him dry
when it’s raining on him; and warm?
I warm him with the warmth
of my body, but in the rain
my body is cold.  I think of you
now, how if we were together
I would lay my woolen shawl
over your shoulders, your
bony shoulders.  I would 
dress your infant son
in new dry clothing,
wrap his cold feet in a blanket,
rock him to sleep.  I would quench
the incessant buzz of drones,  
sweep smoke from the sky, clear the air
of the stench of death and poison.
I would hold my hand over the hole
in your tent, shield you, shelter you
at least from the rain.

Day 628

The boy said he’d go
to where the boxes of food
were being distributed.  He
was twelve:  tall, thin from months
of starvation, yet still
strong enough to walk
for a couple of hours before dawn
to reach the site;  to wait
in the heat of the summer day
until they gave him a box
for his family.  Of all
the siblings, older 
or younger, he
was the strongest.  That’s
what they’re saying
about him now, his sisters
and brothers:  that he
was the fastest, the brightest,
the one who never got sick
when the others did.  The one
who always volunteered
to lift this, carry that…The one
who would never refuse a task,
the one whose body seemed able
to withstand whatever came.  What
it couldn’t withstand
was the bullet.  His flesh,
like anyone’s, penetrable.
His brain penetrable.  What
it couldn’t withstand
was the blood
hemorrhaging inside him,
a cascading river; or the sudden
blackness, a curtain falling
once and for all
on sight, breath, everything.

Day 627

If you could take these children
back into your body, feed them
there as they were fed
when they were safe
and hidden in your womb;
if you could take them, their bird-legs,
their twig-arms, their bellies
bloated and stiff, back into the softness
of your flesh; if you could keep them
there, nourish them, shelter them
from everything that would
wound them; if you 
could let them grow there,
thrive there, take 
silent asylum; if they
could wait there and grow
instead of wasting — one
after the other — from hunger…
If they could go back
into your body 
instead of being laid now
in the hard ground, their
bodies like leaves, like feathers,
so weightless you ask yourself
if they ever cried, smiled
at you, walked this earth, spoke words? 

Day 626

They’re told the house next door 
is about to be bombed, so they go
to their oldest sister’s house.
A telephone call at her house
tells them her house
will be bombed, so they go
to an uncle’s house.  A day
passes.  Another
day.  Then his
house is slated to be bombed,
so they all go back to the family’s
house, since the house next door
has already been bombed and is
nothing now but a pile of stones.
They all stand together
in the kitchen, weary,
hungry, looking
around.  The then call comes
that this house, now, in ten
minutes, is going to be bombed.
What kind of vicious
play is this?  What
obscene dance
is being choreographed?
A pot of lentils
sits on the stove, from when
they first left, still uncooked:
someone had thought
to turn the stove off
when they first fled.  Now
they have to escape
again.  Who
will carry the pot of lentils?
Where, if anywhere, will
they cook them?

Day 625

She tries to buy flour for her family
but a bag of flour
costs too much, and there’s none
in any case at the market.
She wants to buy pain medicine for her son,
but no medicine is allowed in
so her son rocks back and forth
all day, holding his leg, whimpering
in pain.  She wants him
to have the shrapnel removed.
She wants him to run across the sand
again the way he did.  She wants him
to be able to eat the bread she wants
to bake.  She wants him to have
the surgery he needs, she wants him
to talk to her like he used to,
to tell her stories from his day.
To laugh.  How long
has it been since he
laughed, she asks herself.  She looks
over at him, holding his leg.
Rocking.  Rocking.