Day 1,042

The child stands and watches
as neighbors dig through the rubble
searching for bodies. This
was her street — no longer
a street but a pile of rocks,
shattered concrete. Somewhere
near here — she can’t
recall exactly — was her house.
The house she lived in
with her parents. Her brothers.
Her grandmother. Somewhere
near here was the house
her friend lived in, the friend
she walked to school with
every morning. She watches them
dig. Everything buried
so long ago. Why
now? she wonders.
There are no
machines: some are digging
with shovels. Some
witch bare hands. What
will they bring to the surface,
she wonders: her mother’s
smile? Her tiny sister’s
hand, waving to her
from the window? A song
she danced to? The shape
of her days? A shaft
of sunlight on the patterned
rug? The cat
who slept in her lap?

Day 1,041

How will this young mother
keep her newborn infant alive
when she has so little milk?
No formula. No diapers.
She wraps her tiny daughter
in cloth torn from an old shirt.
Wraps plastic around the cloth.
Tears another strip of cloth,
another. Her infant is so small,
a single shirt makes seven diapers.
A neighbor whose child
is a few months older
offers to nurse her baby
when she can’t. Assures her
the milk will come in. Someone else
has more cloth. Someone
has a clean blanket, someone
brings bread and vegetables
for the mother. Her tent fills
with women, with care
for her tiny daughter.
She holds her, kisses her head,
her perfect hands. Her fingernails.

Day 1,040

It is time now
to teach the children
a song. They’re gathered
outside the tent, sitting
cross-legged on the dusty ground.
Some of the older ones
are holding younger ones. Some
who are blind or bandaged hold
the hands of their friends or siblings.
Everyone expectant. Everyone excited
to hear the first line the teacher
will sing. Repeat it in their small
high voices. Add to it
the second line,
the third. Overhead, the drones
do not stop their insidious mission.
The heat of summer intense, the stench
of raw sewage and rotting flesh
pervading the air around them. Still,
what the children are doing now
is learning a song their teacher
is teaching them. A song
about birds, about
the sea. What else
should they do but sing?

Day 1,039

Tell me this will end, the girl
says to her brother. Tell me,
she says to him without words,
lying next to him
in their dark
tent, adjusting the blanket
a little so his small feet
are covered, Tell me
the drones will stop hovering
above us, the explosions — distant
or near us — will cease, and we will hear
birdsong again and the buzzing
of insects. Tell me
our mother will survive. Tell me
she will not disappear
the way our father did
and our older sisters.  Tell me-
because you were born
in this genocide, so you’ve known
nothing else- tell me
what’s real is that the sun
still shines, the tide still
moves in and out, the heart
remembers to beat. Tell me —
though you’re too young
to have many words — the red ball
we were playing with yesterday
will still be in its place
when we walk out of this tent
this morning, and you’ll
pick it up in your
small hands sticky with sweat
from the summer night, toss it
into the hill of sand we made,
run on your sturdy little legs,
laugh, pick it up. Toss it
again. As though play
were all there is.  Were what
we are living for.

Day 1,038

The girl sits in front of her tent
learning English vocabulary.
She’s ten. No real school
since the genocide started,
but her hunger to learn
is as deep as her hunger for food.
She learns by heart names
of the things she encounters
each day: Drone. Tank. Sniper.
Smoke. Repeats them to herself.
Amputee. Pain. Skeleton. Skull.
Burial, she learns; and
the terms for kinship. Uncle
and cousin and aunt. Great-
grandmother. Buried, she says
to herself: all buried. All
under dirt. Under the earth? she
wonders. She’ll ask
her one older sister still living
which would be more correct.

Day 1,037

from a photograph

On the rubble of what was known
as the Italian Tower
in Gaza City, an artist
has painted the portrait
of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya.
The wall nearly toppled.
Cracks in the concrete
his face
looks out from. One
lengthy crack
diagonally across
his neck, as though
the bomb that hit the tower
deliberately hit the portrait
to make it look
like he’s being strangled.
The doctor himself — his
portrait —
has become part
of the rubble: his eyes
stare darkly from the broken
wall, taking in
everything that has happened.
Everything that has not
stopped happening.

Day 1,036

The child was in his classroom.
Classroom? More likely a tent.
More likely a structure
without walls, ceiling, foundation.
The child — a boy,
sixth grader — was
in his classroom, writing
in his notebook. Writing
what? Some fact
of history? Geography?
The location of some
river? Or an algebraic
equation: what does X
equal if X minus Y
equals a father? An
older brother? The boy
was sitting at his makeshift desk
in his makeshift classroom
writing in his makeshift notebook
when suddenly a quadcopter
stopped still
in the air above him.
Hung there. Took aim. Fired.
Suddenly. Suddenly the hand
that had been holding the pencil
stalled in midair. Blood
spilling over the page
where he had been writing,
the hand dropping uselessly
by the boy’s side.

Day 1,035

In the tent where they live,
her father has had another seizure.
No medicine for epilepsy
since longer than she can remember.
His eyes are closed now. The flailing
stopped. She puts the plastic knife
she uses to press down his tongue
to keep him from choking
in its place in a cardboard box
she keeps by the mattress
he sleeps on. Once he would
come home from his work,
pick her up in his arms,
swing her high over his head.
Now his brain is weakened,
his body weakened. Too
many seizures. Not
enough food. Not enough water.
Nothing to do but lie
on the mattress and watch
through the flap of the tent
as his younger kids play outside.
His wife murdered. This daughter,
his eldest, is wiping his forehead
now, where beads of sweat
have collected from the heat
of the electricity in his brain
that caused his whole body
to writhe and shake
and the heat outside
that beads moisture as well
on the tent panels.
Once she would have prayed
that he find work again,
that he lift up the younger ones again
as he’d lifted her. Now
her prayer is just that the seizures
come less often. That
the small plastic knife not go missing.

Day 1,034

He was up on the roof
where the buckets were.
He was scooping some water
into a jug so his mother
could cook dinner. He was a boy,
thin but strong. He loved sports.
He loved running. Climbing.
Now he’s been killed
by a drone. Now his mother
has lost her first child,
her oldest child.
Now the buckets have been
shot too, the water
they’ve collected is running
over the roof, running
down the side of the building.
Wasted. Gone
to join everything wasted.
Now the child is gone
and the water is gone
and the younger ones
are crying for their brother
and their mother is standing
on the soaked roof looking
at her child’s lifeless body
and wondering how
she will live her life without him.

Day 1,033

They are holding a funeral
for those buried under the rubble
in a bombing nearly three years ago.
Bodies never recovered. Bodies
never laid solemnly in the ground,
never covered with earth. Bodies
that are fragments of bodies.
Bodies of children. Their mothers.
Bodies that -- moments before the bombing --
were whole. Were running. Speaking.
for bodies the buildings collapsed on.
For buildings. For a whole neighborhood.
For words and teachings and fragrances.
For the sound of lids being placed on pots.
For windows that closed and opened.
For shafts of sunlight that spilled over rugs.
For cats that slept in the corners of rooms.
For dogs who walked, mornings
and evenings, beside their people.
For sidewalks lined with flowers and trees.
A funeral for the already buried.
A funeral for bodies eaten by rats and insects.
A funeral for everything that has decomposed.