Day 980

Dr Abu Safiya

See how his face is marked
with the grief
of these eighteen months,
Not only the grief: the torture,
the humiliations. See
the weight he has lost,
the time he has lost,
the work he has lost.
His son’s lost life
inscribed on his forehead,
the patients he wouldn’t abandon,
still held in his broken hands.
He asks for his story to be told
by a friend, a journalist;
he doesn’t know — he’s been
so deprived of knowing —
the journalist
has been killed. Who, then,
will tell his story? Who will assure him
that the gradual death
inflicted on him — loss
by loss, beating
by beating — will not
be all we remember of him?