Day 1,014

for Sami, three years old, WCNSF*

All his life now
he will attempt to recall
what it had been like
until that moment
when everything changed:
a summer night,
he and his older sister asleep,
his parents asleep.
Then the explosion.
All his life he will try
to picture his sister’s face,
to hear her voice, to think
of the game they’d been playing
the night before. To feel
the touch of his mother’s hand
on his face, smoothing his hair,
her mouth kissing his forehead.
To evoke what it was
to sit on his father’s shoulders,
imagine the conversations
they’d had as he rode —
so high! — past the rubble.
All his life he will feel
the things that had happened
without being named, without
being archived: like a rain
that falls unnoted at night,
yet leaves the air with its scent,
or the sound of a chord
that lingers with the hearer
after the strings
have been plucked; but the music
has ended, the song
disappeared, unable
to be reconstructed.

*WCNSF is the tragic designation given during the genocide to wounded children who are the sole survivors of their families: Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.