Day 674

for Anas Al-Sharif


Nonstop bombing: the last
truth you published. City
circled by fire. How many
dead? How many wounded?
Your days spent behind a camera.
Your crime, for which
they targeted you: documenting
what happened. Filming it, recording it.
Not only your words but the sounds
everyone in the city heard, the flames they saw
consuming tents, the wordless merciless
evidence. Evidence. Beyond
challenge, beyond denial. You witnessed that,
let others, in far places, witness. For that
they murdered you: shut down
eyes, ears, mouth. Your hands that wrote.

Day 673

A child stands on a hill,
the remains of his city
stretching before him, behind him,
around him. Overhead, a parachute
falls from a plane. It will land
too far for him to run
and find what it carries: some boxes
of food, much of it inedible:
spoiled, moldy, not enough.
Unreachable, he knows: he watches it
touch ground, sees those
who are closer race to get it.
How many days since he’s eaten?
Since his small brother has eaten?
A summer day. A day when, in
another time, he’d be kicking a ball
on the beach with his friends.
Suddenly all he wants in this world
is the feel of sand under his feet,
the predictable thud of the ball
as it flies through the blue air.

Day 672

The child is digging desperately
through the rubble
to find his grandparents. They must
be there! They have
always been where
he could find them!
Maybe they’re breathing, just
waiting for him to uncover them, waiting
for him to remove the shard
of a wall from their eyes, clear a space
so they can sit up, look around, ask him
what he was doing when the bomb fell
on them all. Ask if he’s
all right, if he knows
where the others are, if he
could get them a cup of water. Tell him
how happy they are to see him, how
strong he is, how, as soon
as they stretch a little, they’ll
stand, dust off their clothes, check
him to make sure his small hands
are not bleeding.

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?