Day 1,047

No chairs. No desks. No
blackboards. Not even notebooks.
Yet daily the children
come to school, to the tent-school,
to sit inside the tent or outside,
according to the weather.
Three years without school.
Ten, twelve, thirteen displacements.
Some of the children without legs.
Some without arms, without hands.
A few who have lost an eye.
Yet whatever they learned
before the genocide
has not been lost: a girl
struggles with multiplication.
Two digits. Three. Remembering
that she learned it before. Remembering
the calm classroom, trees swaying
outside the windows
in a gentle breeze. The child
who sat next to her, the one
behind her: gone. Gone
with their families. Their
homes. Two digits. Three
digits times three. Slowly,
slowly, it comes back to her.
Multiplier. Multiplicand.
She remembers how, she writes
the product of the numbers
on the sheet of paper the teacher
has given her, torn in five parts,
for five children.