Day 564

When their house was bombed
all the girl carried out 
was what she’d been holding:
A notebook.  A pen.  There she was,
still alive, her parents and siblings,
incredibly, alive, watching their house (from
the distance they stood at)
burn, collapse.  Everything
gone but the things in their hands:
A stuffed bear.  A key
(grabbed from a shelf)
that would never again
open anything.  But she
had her notebook.  She
— from the shelter
they moved to, then
another shelter, then
a tent, then a different
tent in a different place —
cherished the notebook, wrote
in it daily. Documented
displacements. Losses. 
Grief. The drones
overhead, the hunger,
the moments of laughter,
the dark conversations.  The notebook
became her friend, her sister
when, after months,
her sister was killed.
The notebook became the certainty
that she was a writer, that
writing would be
what carried her, what kept her
whole and living.