Day 1,089

What would you be doing now
if not for the genocide?
A group of teenagers
sit on the rubble — jagged
stones, broken concrete —
as day comes to its end,
talking about their lives.
One says she’d be
in medical school. Another
says he’d be farming
his grandfather’s farm:
peach trees, fig trees.
Another says she’d be married
to the boy she was planning
to marry, had he not
been killed in an airstrike.
Yet another speaks
of simpler things: she’d
be combing her sister’s
long hair, braiding it,
tying the braids with ribbons,
had her sister, who was four,
not been martyred. They sit,
watch the sun go down,
grow quiet as they look
beyond them over so many
destroyed buildings, collapsed
roofs, bombed-out gardens.
Bombed universities, bombed
hospitals, medical schools, farms.
What would their lives
have been? Who
would they be sitting with
now? What would they each
be going home to?