Day 612

She is aching to feed her baby
who has been born
after years of waiting, longing,
trying.  The baby
is small, come
into this world
only days ago,
four weeks early.  Still,
she is whole.  She has toenails,
eyelashes.  Her mother
offers her breast.  The baby
latches.  Sucks.  There’s
a little milk.  Not much.
Perhaps when she can suck
more vigorously, more milk
will come in.  But if there’s
not much milk, there can be
no vigor.  The mother
thinks about this as she sits
in her tent.  Her baby
is sleeping now,
peacefully, in her lap.  Too
new yet to know
fear, to worry
there won’t be enough.

Day 611

What will he do now
without his children?
The one whose tangled hair
he brushed.  The one
whose shoes he tied,
crooning these are too
small, too small, too small.
The one he held
all night when she cried
from hunger.  What 
will he do without
their laughter? Without
their hands reaching
for his hands? How
will he use his arms
if not to pick them up?
How will he use his voice
if not to call them?  

Day 610

The boy is holding
his sister’s hand. He’s six
or seven. She’s probably
four, looks younger
from not having eaten.
Their mother left before dawn
to get them some food.
It’s late afternoon now.
She hasn’t come back.
The boy knows
she should be with them
by now, knows something
has surely happened 
to her.  His sister
is crying: hunger?
Fear?  She feels
his worry, though
he doesn’t speak it.
He stands,
not letting go
of her hand,
outside their tent,
squinting in bright sun,
watching their neighbor
from the next tent
squat on the ground, washing
her children’s clothes
in a pot. It consoles him
a little to think
he could ask her
to be their mother
if their mother is dead.

Day 609

Noisy crowd. People shouting, some
who have waited since
two in the morning.  Some
who have walked.  Walked far.  Walked
for hours.  You woke hours
before; you were one of those
who came before the food, before
the drones, before the officials
arrived to distribute the boxes.
You stood in the blue pre-dawn.
You came because your small
brother cannot stop
crying from hunger. Because 
your father, wounded, can barely
walk. Your mother, so weak
she hasn’t stood for days.
You came to bring them back
a box of food, sparse
as it is.  One box.  But the drones
came as you waited, let loose
their vicious intent, their
deadly aim.  Blood
ran down your cheek.  Daylight
had come but you, suddenly,
were engulfed in darkness.

Day 608

from a photograph


You could learn
every bone in the upper body
by studying this photograph
of a five year old boy.  Naked
from the waist up, his wrists
like twigs, shoulders like rods
his sticklike arms hang down from.
His face narrows from cheeks
to chin, comes to a point
like a dog’s
snipey muzzle. His eyes
stare at something
we can’t see in the photograph:
angry, fixed.  Is he able
to move them?  Can
he see? Can he turn
his head on that filament
of a neck?  Does he have
the strength?  The child
is five!  He looks
like ninety.  Older.
He looks
as though his life
has coursed through him,
rumbled over him, wrested 
from his rigid hands
history.  Memory.  Does his mouth
still open?  Can he
tell us the name
of the boy he was?

Day 607

It’s raining.  The rain
penetrates your tent.  When you
were a child you loved rain,
loved the way it cleansed the air,
the sound of rain against
windows, roof.  Now
there are no windows.  No roof.
Now there is only this tent
for your whole family, pitched
in sand, rocked by wind. 
Now the rain
comes in through split seams,
through holes overuse
has made, through the flap
that has never zipped closed.
You lie, trying to sleep, in slowly
pooling water, listening
to the merciless buzz of drones
beneath the unrelenting rain.
Somewhere not far from you
an explosion pierces the night.
Whose tent? You hear screaming. 
Children, too,
screaming.  Then the buzzing
subsides, the screaming
stops. A life —
lives? — taken.  All
you can hear again now
is the sound of rain.

Day 606

There was a family
who lived in this house.
The house is abandoned now:
nothing but walls
collapsed onto other walls.
Charred doors.  Charred floorboards.
There were rooms.  There was the smell
of cooking, onions and garlic
and peppers.   There were voices
of children playing.  There
were grandparents reading
to grandchildren, a cat
who had kittens: kittens
wrestling each other
on the rug,  There were
rugs! Curtains. Lamps.
There was everything needed
to make a life.

Day 605

Dr. Hamdi al-Najjar


Her husband takes 
his last breath. He’d been
in the hospital
for a week, his brain
shot through with shrapnel.
Possibly, because he was there
when the bomb hit their house,
he knew that nine of their children
were dead. Probably,
as he lay in intensive care,
he had no idea that, Adam, his one
remaining son, had had his left arm
amputated.  He lay for a week
attempting to live, his brain
bleeding slowly into itself,
his thoughts, his memories,
bathed in blood.  At last
there was no way to fight, no way
to keep from joining his children,
no way to keep breathing: not
for his wife.  Not for Adam.
Not for the patients he’d see
and wouldn’t see. A doctor
who’d treated him and found
he’d succumbed to his wounds
told the others, grimly, Now
someone else can be taken in.
Now we have one more bed.

Day 604

A mother searches through the rubble
for her child.  What she finds
is a shoe, a red shoe
she had helped her child
slip on her foot
in the morning.  How could this shoe
be so intact, and her daughter’s body
scattered in pieces?  Little shoe
her daughter loved, little red shoe
passed down from a cousin.
Little shoe the child learned
to run in. Little shoe
that had just gotten
to the right size, the child
so proud that her feet had grown … The mother holds
the shoe, wipes it clean
with her hand, presses it
tenderly to her cheek.  Will she
keep it? Bury it?  

Day 603

I am thinking now
of the father
who held his baby’s body
after the baby’s head
was severed from his neck.
Held it.  Rocked it.  Wept.
His tears running down the small
bleeding chest. I am thinking
of how many times this father
had held his child
when the child was alive. 
How, when the child
was sleepy, he’d lay his head
on his father’s shoulder.  How
the baby would turn his head
when his father walked 
into the tent.  How important it was
to hold a hand under that head
before the baby grew strong enough
to hold it up himself.  How important
to keep it warm.  Tenderly
to wash it with what water there was.