Day 614

He did not want to take
his younger brother
to the place
where food was being
distributed.  Of all their family
they were the only ones
left, seventeen and fourteen,
Two brothers.  He, the older one,
had become father, mother.  He
was the sky over his brother’s
head, the stars looking down
from that sky.  They were hungry.
There was no food.  There was only
water that made them sick, that made it
hard to walk in the summer heat.
He did not want his brother
to come, and his brother
did not want to be left alone.
So they walked.  Slowly,
while it was still dark,
they approached the place.
Suddenly there were drones,
suddenly there were people
screaming.  It was his brother
who grabbed his hand, pulled him
away, out of the line of fire.
It was his brother — thin,
his face contorted
with fear — who dragged him
over the rocky ground. They lay
listening. They waited.
After a while, when it was quiet,
they stood.  They began
walking back together.

Day 613

Two children are buried
under the rubble of their home:
a five year old boy
and a baby.  Their mother,
too, is buried.  The five year old
cries, screams, lets anyone still alive
know he is there with his mother
and baby brother.  People
whose houses have also
just been bombed
rush to the cries, begin
digging.  (And this
is a story of community,
of sumud…) They dig,
They dig harder.  Faster.
They dig with their hands.
They dig with rocks, turn pieces
of rubble to shovels.  Dig.
At last , after hours,
they free them.  They
are all alive!  All
three.  A neighbor
who has just freed the baby
from his fallen house, his
fallen life, lays him
now in his father’s arms.
He is whole.  He will go on living.

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.