Day 620

Once you woke and walked
to the bakery down the street,
bought bread and sweet rolls
for your family.  This
happened day after day.  You
were always the first
to wake.  You loved
walking out into early light:
the breeze from the sea, smiles
of neighbors on their way
to work, children’s voices
from the open windows:
playing, squabbling.  The sounds
of lids being placed on pots.  Smells
of cooking.  Once!  Once
for years.  These
were your mornings:
returning home, arms
abundant with goodness, your
younger sisters and brothers
racing each other
to the front door.

Day 619

Your father went to get food
and he never came back.  Now
your mother says she’ll go.
She promises to be careful.
But who can be careful
when shots are fired?  When drones
fly overhead?  Even at eight years old
you know that.  You know
she’s only trying
to make you feel all right.
She knows you know that,
but she’s walking there
anyway now.  She knows
she could be killed.  She knows
how your stomach 
has been aching for months
from hunger.

Day 618

In the shattered corridors
of the shattered hospital, patients
lie side by side.  Impossible
at first to tell who is dead
and who is living.  The nurses
and doctors are sick
from exhaustion and poisoned water.
Some can barely stand.  One
breaks down in tears
when a child she has
been treating finally
opens her eyes, sits up,
looks around.  Hour after hour.
When do they sleep?  What
do they eat?  What more
do they have within themselves
to give?  Time.  Grief.  Comfort.
Some, in a frantic effort to save
a patient, are even giving
blood from their own
broken bodies.

Day 617

Blackout.  No way
to reach your aunt, your friend.
The friend who lives
so far away you have never
seen her; but daily
she sends you something
to remind you you’re not
forgotten. Now
there’s nothing, there’s been
nothing for days.  Nothing
to remind you the world
is not just this hell, this
darkness, this viciousness.
This bleak destruction.  Now
the courses you were taking
cannot be taught.  Now the thread
that held you
for months so tentatively
to history, memory — to everything
you’ve dreamed — has been frayed.
And yet you write.  And yet
you sit at the desk you
(miraculously) still have
and write.  Write.

Day 616

for Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar
and her son, Adam Al-Najjar

 
In a beautiful place
the boy says
there are no bombs
and I go to school.
There are desks at school.
Kids do their lessons
and then they go to play
in the courtyard
and nobody dies.
The boy is eleven.
He has lost all nine
of his siblings.
He has lost his father.
He has lost his house.
He is on a plane now
with his mother.
They are going to Milan,
where doctors
will treat his injuries.
Where he and his mother
(and his aunt and his cousins)
will begin a new life.
Will live in a beautiful place.
A place with food.  With
hospitals.  With schools.
He will heal over the summer.
He will learn Italian.
He will go to school.
His mother — a beautiful
place is a place
where my mother
is not always
sad — will work
again as a pediatrician.
Where she will tell
her story.  Where
she will care
for this one
remaining son.  Where
they will remember
the place they
lived in, which,
before the genocide,
was a beautiful place.

Day 615

Here is the street where you
grew up.  Can you
see it, though it’s nothing now
but rock, bulldozed flat?  Can you
find the houses?  Your own house?
Here is the school
where you learned to read.
You may find a shard or two
of a desk, a chair, a wall
that stood between your classroom
and your sister’s.  Here
is your sister, her hair
braided, her hand
holding a pen.  Her notebook
open.  Is that
the way you remember her?  Can you
picture her walking?  Eating?
Playing with the cat?  Here
is the cat, gray and white, 
his eyes green, tail
a little crooked,  What
would you give
if you could hold him
even one more time
on your lap?

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?