Day 641

For Manal Miqdad


A post to my friends
Who have books I loaned you:
If I should die, keep them. They’re yours.
A post to my cousin: if nothing happens
To my library, it’s yours.

Poet, mother of three,
you ask yourself in your journal
why, with bombs falling
not far from you, you’re thinking
about your books. All the books
you lost in the last siege, then replaced.
All the books you’ve loved, learned from,
read passages from to your friends,
your children. How, you ask yourself,
will you carry them when you flee?
How many will you be able to hold?
How much will they slow you down?
Will your children take some of them?
They’ll be carrying their own things.
Why are you thinking so desperately
about your books? Why books?
All this you’re asking yourself
as bombs fall on your city.
You remember hours reading, studying.
How they shaped your life, these books.
The past, you write — “once
Upon a time”— is now a cemetery.