Day 941

The child sits alone
on a concrete slab.
No one from her family
is with her.  No one alive.
She’s trying to remember
the sound of her father’s
voice, her mother
singing to her, her brothers
laughing, playing a game
on the front steps of their house –
that, too, disappeared.
Her grandmother
talking softly to her
while bending over her garden.
Why, when the buzz of a drone
is so familiar, does it feel
so hard to recall
those voices?  Why,
when now she can tell
one kind of warplane
from another, is it so
impossible to picture
the exact green-blue
of her sister’s eyes?