Day 624

The child has been in a coma
for three months.  While his mind
and his body were far
from reach, so many things
changed.  So much
was lost that wasn’t
already lost.  In the bombing
that pulled him 
into that blankness, 
his house was destroyed,
his father killed, siblings
killed, mother badly wounded.
The boy awakened, remembering
nothing.  Not the explosion,
not the fire, not the ride
to the hospital.  All of it plunged
into some dark region
of his ten-year-old being,
preserved perhaps in some
cells, some dreams, some
inscrutable reactions he’ll have
as long as he lives.  He woke.
Looked around.  Everything
in the hospital room was new.
Strange.  Frightening.  How
will we answer him now, when
he asks — his own voice
strange to him — Why,
if I’m in the hospital,
is my father not with me?

Day 623

The flowers that grew in your garden
may have seeded themselves
elsewhere, may give forth
generations — carried by winds
or insects — in some
other place.  Your garden
is gone, gone under piles
of fallen concrete, dust, of
everything that lived and breathed,
kissed, danced, blossomed,
fruited, fell in its time
from the stem, in its
full delicious juiciness.  Once this
was a place of abundance.
Once this was a piece of the earth
that gave life.  Who dares to be certain
this will not come again?  Who
will deny this
strength?  This life force? Know
that under the soil — blood-soaked
as it is, riddled
with poisons as it is —
there may well still be
millions of seeds.

Day 622

After his son the young journalist was killed
the man collapsed into his friend’s arms
and wept.  He wept, remembering the boy
who had loved nothing better
than kicking a ball down the street.
He wept remembering how he’d taught the boy
to read, to write, to love observing things.
He remembered how the boy
had been ready to study
when the genocide began
and then said instead
he was going to document
what he saw, what was happening.
He thought of his son telling stories 
of children who walked
through fire and survived. How he thought
his son was also walking,
daily, through other
varieties of fire. How
he thought to warn his son to step back,
to take care, to stop for a day, a week.
To kick a ball down the street
with a friend.  How he didn’t,
how he could never
find the right words.  How
it was not a surprise 
when he got the call
that his son had been killed
and how he knew
he could never have
stopped him.

Day 621

You lost your first child
under the rubble, shielded
(but not enough) by your womb.
For days you lay
buried there, barely
breathing, shards of your house
on top of you, crushing
your lungs, fallen
in such a way that you could
barely see
daylight and night. When
they dug you out, you
and your husband, the baby’s heart
had stopped being able to beat.
Now, after more than a year,
another child makes his way
into life within you.  Day by day
his heart beats more strongly,
his fingers and toes define themselves.
Who will he be, this child
whose growth is punctuated by bombs?
And you are weak.  Hungry.
Your child is nourishing himself
from your body, but your body
is wasting away as he
grows larger.  How
will you feed this child
when there is no food,
when even a single bag of flour
costs more than everything
you possess?

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?