Day 602

You waited in line all day
to get food for your children.
The smallest one — two and a half — 
came with you.  Waited.  The sun
beat down, your child
was crying.  Overhead, drones
fixed on their targets.  Two, three
people killed.  Waiting.  You waited.
You watched others being handed
boxes of food:  unclear
what was in them.  There would be
something you could feed
this child and her brothers.
You saw people, hour
after hour, walk away with boxes.
Waited.  Four hours.  Six.
You watched shadows lengthen, the sun
move westward across the sky.  At last
a man called out to the crowd
that no boxes were left.  Not
one.  Your child by then
had fallen asleep, her small face
red from the sun.  Her arms,
bone-thin, wrapped
around your shoulders.

Day 601

She walked through the wall of flame,
the flame that consumed
her mother, her father, her sister.
The child is four.  Four.  How
did she find her way through?
How did she know this was all
that could save her?  Go!  Go!  
Go, though the flames
are licking at your arms, your legs,
your face.  Walk, Hanin, as fast
as you can through these rooms
you lived in.  Go without thinking,
without crying, without
looking back.  Go
until you reach a place
where the flames subside.  Go
though your skin is burning.
Go though everyone inside
has already been devoured, is
nothing but ash and naked bone.

Day 600

Once this was a street
lined with shops, cafés, small
colorful gardens where people
sat, told one another
about their day, their work,
their children.  Once
at the end of the street
was a school.
You could hear, in early
mornings and late afternoons,
the shouts of children
racing across the yard.
Sometimes you heard them
singing, a group of them
led by their teacher.  You
still think of the songs.  Now
there’s no street, only
a corridor of gray broken rock
people have carved 
through the rubble.  Now
there’s no school, only
a memory of voices
calling to each other
in bright air as you sat
at one of the cafés
greeting your friends,
another ordinary day, sipping
strong coffee.  What
can you name now
that hasn’t disappeared?  You,
a living ghost moving
among the ghosts
of everything you knew.

Day 599

with gratitude to Dr Ezzideen Shehab


Do not look away.  However painful 
the child without arms, the child
who runs screaming from the bombed house
where everyone in her family
is burning, the child
who is only bones, the mother
who bends over the charred bodies
of her daughters and sons, attempting
to embrace them: do not
look away.  Do not turn your face
from the infants who lived for a week,
a month, then froze 
or wasted away.  Do not shrink
from the viciousness that is swallowing them. 
Fix your gaze on the darkness, the emptiness.
As long as you witness, they will not
be forgotten.  They will not have slipped
into death unnoticed.  Do not let yourself
be deterred by your own pain.  Look
longer.  Look more deeply.  If your eyes
can’t withstand it, look
with your soul.  Let your soul
make its final stand against the void. 

Day 598

Your one remaining child
lies in a hospital bed.  His body
is a charred log. You pray
every minute that he stay alive
and part of you prays
that he find a way
out of hunger, thirst, grieving.
Part of you wants to lie down
beside him, pass the strength
of your body to his,
like trees that seem to grow
from the same root.  Another 
part of you wonders
whether the death
that might soon come for him 
could take you instead, mistake
you for the one it’s
been sent to claim.

Day 597

This mother has lost nine
of her ten children.
Seven have been found, though
not their whole bodies.  It’s assumed
that two more lie buried
under the rubble
of what had been their home.
The mother is a doctor; she
had been working at a hospital
when the bomb was dropped
and the fire spread, the explosion
spread, and suddenly all but one
of her children dissolved
into nothing. Into ruin and waste
and devastation.  Her husband too
lies in a hospital, critically
injured.  And she, who had been
treating patients:  now what
will she do with her own
saved, shattered life?  How
will she go on
raising the single child who is left?
And her story will be told. Her story
will be told for a week, maybe 
a few weeks. Then, tell me:
will it too,
like the lives of her children,
disappear under the rubble?
The unspeakable debris
of so many lives?

Day 596

This baby is two weeks old
and growing smaller, as though
she could almost fit back
into the narrow
uncomplicated space
she emerged from, the space
where thirst and hunger
didn’t exist.  Where fear
didn’t exist.  Every day
she loses a little 
of the body she came 
with, and her mother
has little milk to feed her.
The older children
bring their mother what food
they can find.  A neighbor
offers what she has.  The baby
gives all her strength
to crying for more, and the mother
cries because there is
no more.  How long
do they have?  My children
are dying a little each day,
the mother says
to no one, to herself.
To the menacing sky.

Day 595

Overhead there’s a drone.
Is this one for you?
You’re ten.  You’ve been sent
by your grandmother, the only
family you have left, to find
some water.  She
can’t walk.  She has promised
she’ll make some rice for
the two of you if you can find
water to boil it, and you think
you know where to find some
when suddenly you hear the drone
and you know you need to hide.
You’re ten.  Ten.  You press
your back against a fallen wall.
You try not to move.  Not even
to breathe.  You know the drone
is searching for a target
and you don’t want that
to be you.  You close your eyes.
You try to picture the rice:  a plate
full of rice, maybe some greens.
You imagine its fragrance.  Imagine
your grandmother bringing a spoonful
of rice to her dry lips.  The drone
still buzzes above you.  You crack open
one eye.  You see it’s passing.
Who will it find now, if this time
it isn’t you?  The boy
you were playing with
this morning?

Day 594

The child’s face is burned, burned
down to the bone.  Who can say
who this child was? What his smile
was like, how his mouth
puckered a little
when he was sad.  How his eyes —
blue? brown? — pooled with tears.
And his hair — what color
was his hair?  Did his mother
brush it morning and evening,
with a soft brush? with her fingers?
How can a face catch fire?  How long
does a child stay conscious
when his face is turning to ash?
And who will step forward now
to wrap his broken body, cover
his face for the last time, swaddle
him in a white shroud until he looks
like everyone else who is dead?

Day 593

A few grains of rice.  Canned lentils.
How long can a child of four
live on these?  How long
can she survive when the rice
is boiled in foul water?  When 
foul water is all
she has to drink?  You tell her
to sleep.  You tell her
to save her energy.  You see her
sitting outside the tent, sifting sand
through her small, weak fingers.
trying to build a hill out of sand,
but the sand slides down, down
and down, and her hill
will not stand.  And she
is too weak to stand, too weak
to withstand not being able
to make her hill, and she starts
crying now for her father
who was killed, her three brothers
killed, her infant sister
who died of hunger, for the sky
that used to be clear of warplanes,
for the hill she is trying
to make out of sand
that keeps falling, falling.