
photo by Ali Hamad/APA
When the genocide began I started writing daily notes. The notes, many of them handwritten in various notebooks, were disconnected lines, images, stories I’d read or heard. Some of them evolved into poems, included in this collection; but it wasn’t until Day 167 that — having heard about a mother who was able to save one of her children but not the others, and a doctor who was saving the amputated limbs of wounded children, putting the limbs into boxes labeled with their names — I felt the urgency to document these tragedies in a whole poem every day, and that is what I will do until the genocide ends.
I intend to keep writing until the ceasefire is permanent — until Palestine is free.
Day 671
What you miss right now
are the simple struggles
you had at school: the exams
you weren’t prepared for, the papers
you sat up writing all night
and still couldn’t finish. The professors
who didn’t explain. What you miss
is what you did from hour to hour,
the ordinary structure of the day,
the simple progression of tasks and meals.
You wake, dizzy from hunger. Stumble
out of the tent to see the sky. The sun’s
position tells you the time. Around you,
the ones who are left still sleep. You count
them silently, count the number of days
since you’ve been here, do
one more morning,
the ravaged mathematics of survival.
Day 670
You wake to the cries
of birds of prey overhead. Whose flesh
are they searching for? Your infant’s,
dying of starvation? Your
father’s, old man who survived
so many wars, so many bombings, and now
has no energy even to speak?
Your older children, who weeks ago
still played and ran in front of the tent,
and now lie quietly all day on dusty ground,
not even whimpering? Only the birds
are announcing their hunger. You
watch them circle. Every moment
you wonder who will be next.
Day 669
They’re burning rubber. They’re burning
old tires. They’re burning books
they loved, books they’d been given, books
they used in school, books
they bought and never read. They’re
burning clothes that are too big, clothes
their grandmothers wore when
they were alive, clothes their children
wore before they were killed. They’re burning their mothers’ shoes,
their fathers’ jackets,
tablecloths they used for years, shawls.
They’re burning the remnants
of their lives, of years, so they can
cook the scant rice, the pasta, the canned
lentils that may, if they’re lucky,
keep them alive one more day.
Day 668
In another time, we would swim
in the sea. The children would chase
each other, laughing; skip
over the incoming tide, build towers of sand
and see who could make theirs
the highest. Now we make cakes
from mud, pretend we can eat them.
Now the children build sand houses,
painstakingly work to make them
beautiful, complex, with doors
of driftwood, windows marked
with twigs, scraps of paper,
roofs of dried sea grass:
then throw heavy rocks to violently crush them.
Day 667
What could she have done
to save her mother? The girl
kneels over the shrouded body.
They had been sitting together, talking.
Before that, they had eaten
some lentils, a few spoonsful
of rice. It had been
a quiet day. Then, suddenly,
the explosion: the girl,
unaccountably, spared.
The mother hit directly.
They’d been the only ones
there; her brothers
had gone to look for water.
They, too, spared.
Their father long disappeared
under the rubble.
But their mother: the girl,
her eyes blank, startled,
a neighbor’s hand on her shoulder,
keeps repeating, We were only talking.
We were only talking.
Day 666
The girl is eleven. Her whole family
was killed: mother, father, sisters, a brother
who was only beginning to walk.
She woke in a hospital, bandages
on her head, not understanding
what the nurses were telling her.
She still – months later – can’t believe
they’re gone. Keeps asking
when they’ll come for her, bring her
home, buy her new clothes
for the new school year. Apart
from those questions, she doesn’t
talk. Not to the doctors
who still check her wounds.
Not to the neighbors who
took her in, not
to their children, not
to the children playing
between rows of tents.
She sits, staring
into the smoky distance,
as though, if she waited
long enough, everything
would begin to come back.
Day 665
What, if muscle
is gone, fills the space
between skin and bone? A mother
looks at her daughter’s back:
shoulder blades like wedges,
like wings turned to stone.
Ribs like the veins of autumn leaves.
She is feeding her salt water,
spoiled food: it won’t
keep her alive, but when she cries
like this from thirst, from hunger,
what choice does a mother have?
No flesh. No soft tissue. Is it
horror that fills that space? Dread?
Dreams of the life that
used to be? Has death
slipped itself in already
where these bones
are joined?
Day 664
They were waiting for their mother
to come back with food. She
had wanted to go the day before,
the day before that, but the older ones
stopped her. Better to starve all together
than lose their mother: their father
already gone, the days growing harder,
the bombs and the shooting relentless.
The hunger relentless. Was it
the little ones’ desperate crying?
The oldest boy’s ribs standing out
as though he were an x-ray of himself?
The oldest girl’s hands like stick drawings of hands?
One day, two,
they convinced their mother
not to go. The third day they woke
and found she’d left the tent.
They waited. Waited. Noon, afternoon.
At last someone came. Told them
what had happened.
Day 663
Once he kicked a ball
all the way into the goal
from mid-field, to win the game.
His teammates thronged him,
carried him on their shoulders,
walked with him to his grandmother’s house
so they could all tell her
what a champion he was. Now
he’s so thin and weak
he can barely stand. Now
more than half of the boys on his team
are dead or have lost their legs. Now
his mother brings a thin soup
to him and his grandmother, made
from the liquid in a can of lentils,
the lentils gone. The boy
sits up, takes the soup
from the spoon his mother is holding
the way he used to do
when he was small, before
the gone field, the gone friends,
before the ball that lies untouched
in the corner of the tent.
Day 662
The dead hover in the air
like leaves, like particles
of mist. Like ghosts of fruit
from a destroyed abundant tree.
They will not be gently
laid into the earth. They will not
be covered with petals and soft dirt.
They are ripe or withered. Young fruits,
green and turgid. Buds
that should have become fruit.
Blossoms opened and never opened.
Fruits shattered, crushed, mauled,
still oozing their juices.