Day 681

The young medical student
is talking about his work.  Studies
interrupted, courses stopped,
then started, then stopped again.
Still he does what he can.
Still he has learned
how to substitute one procedure
he can do for another
he can’t, one medication
he can find for another
that’s not allowed in.  He has learned
how to practice medicine 
when it’s impossible: how to operate
without anesthesia, how to sanitize
his instruments when there’s no 
clean water.  He pauses a moment
in the conversation, thinks
of his parents, his brothers
and sisters — all trapped,
as they’ve been for months,
under the rubble of their house.
(He alone escaped, having been
at the hospital when the house
was bombed.)  For months
he’s wanted to dig them out,
give them a real burial.
To find a medicine for atrocious loss,
a surgery for a shattered history.
A functional IV line for horror.  

Day 680

The children sit in a circle
naming the things they want to do
when the siege is over.  Eat
a whole chocolate bar, a boy says:
everyone shouts in agreement.
A girl says she’d like to hear
her mother’s voice waking her up
for school.  But it won’t
happen, she says almost inaudibly,
head bowed.  It can’t happen.
My school was bombed and my mother
is dead.  The children sit
in a circle, a circle of children
like circles everywhere: some
solemn, some squirming, some
sitting on their hands.  Some
tugging at the clothes
of the child sitting next to them.
They sit in a circle so they all
can see each other.  Count them.
How many will there be tomorrow?

Day 679

for Ahmed Muin


A man tunes his voice
to the pitch the drone makes,
sings a song of resistance.  Others
join:  a choir
of resistance claiming
the occupier’s drone
as theirs.  As music.  As something
they can use.  Something
they can transform, imbue
with another life.  The way children
make playgrounds from fallen
concrete:  agility courses,
jumping from one collapsed wall
to another.  Or birds who nest
in a captured, disabled tank,
raise their hatchlings there,
sheltered from brutal heat and shrapnel.

Day 678

for Shahd Abusalama

The house you were born in
has become a mass grave.
A continuous dirge. A funeral
without end.  A crucible.
A solemn procession of loss.
Once there was laughter,
conversation through the night.
Now half of those
who filled these rooms
are buried beneath them,
and the others are left
to mourn. Rage.  Weep.  To dread
the next hour.  To wrest the children
out of their fear.  
To appease their starvation
with stories.  To wait.

Day 677

He was held in the harshest prison,
kept in a cage where he couldn’t stand,
stretch, even sit up.  He was
tortured, beaten, fed rotten food.
He’s a child.  He had walked 
to get food.  They kept him,
then finally released him.
Released? Now his torturers
live inside him, keep screaming at him,
deprive him of sleep.  Who could say
he’ll recover?  Who could say
he’ll forget?  His wrists
bear the marks of what they did,
but the marks inside him? Invisible
and worse.  A child.  Hungry,
trying to get food for his 
hungry family.  The cage
still confines him. He carries it
with him. Can you
see it in his hollow
eyes, his trembling hands?   Its bars
made of cruelty. Sadism. 
The derisive laughter of soldiers
not much older than himself.

Day 676

How does a person grow down? the child
asks.  She’s thinking about her cousin,
dead of starvation, two thirds
of his body weight gone.  At nineteen,
he died weighing what she weighs.
Grow down?  when everyone asks her
what she will do when she grows up.
Grow down?  As though
she could be a baby again?  A two-
or a three-year-old?  As though
she could start over again
in her own house.  Her own
neighborhood. As though things
could be again the way
they were:  food
on the table, voices of friends
through the open windows.
Her grandparents alive
and reading to her, singing
old comforting songs.  Walking
outside with her, taking each
of her hands.

Day 675

Do they think they can assassinate
the truth?  Does the Occupation
believe they can blind us?  Deafen us?
Make us not know what we know?
Anas. Mohammed.  Ibrahim.
Moamen.  Mohamed.
Speak their names in the shattered air.
They named what they saw:
starving children.  Severed arms and legs.
They were not afraid.  Or if — since
they were young, had families —
parents, small children — at times
they were — they went on anyway
doing their work.  Journalists in a tent
outside the hospital.  Told
they were targets, they kept
reporting:  silencing
more ominous than death.
Does Israel believe 
it has stopped their voices?
The world is filled with them.
Their words spill with our tears.
What they told has grown louder.
More specific.  More condemning.

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.