Day 1,074

They are bending
over the body
of the child
who was murdered.
Little body
shrouded in white.
Last night
she was still alive.
she was singing a song
she’d learned
on her first day
of school. Singing it
for the grownups.
Making them smile.
Making them happy,
if just for a moment.
Now those who loved her
kneel and grieve.
Now they are kissing
her forehead, her pale
cheeks. Now
they are touching
her cold hands.
They are trying
to say goodbye
and they cannot. They
are trying to let her know
how deeply they loved her
and their words
collapse into sobs
and their throats
go dry.

Day 1,073

Tell me how you rise
from the floor of the tent
where you sleep, your
arthritic knees barely able
to hold you at first. Tell me then
how you steady yourself:
no furniture in the tent,
nothing to hold on to.
Then tell me how you wash,
since there’s no water
anywhere near. Then
how you begin
making your breakfast:
how you light a fire.
How you clean a pot.
A bowl. A cup. Then
tell me how you walk out,
through the corridors
of tents, to find
a place to relieve yourself.
A long line. People talking,
children crying. Now
tell me how you continue
bearing your grief: your house.
Your garden. Your children.
Grandchildren. The sister you promised
(as she died of an illness
that could have been cured)
not to forget. How you speak her name
over and over, as though
you could wake her
from under the rubble.
Tell me how you stop the tears.
Tell me how, when you walk,
you carry the weight
of everything you’ve lost.

Day 1,072

The boy lost an eye
to a piece of shrapnel.
Now he has just one eye
that looks out at his world
of destruction, and another
that cannot see it. That,
instead, looks inward, backward,
forward. That looks
at the way it should
have been: his house
still standing. Other houses
around it, whole. Surrounded
by gardens. His friends
still gathering at the corner
of his tree-lined street,
chatting and laughing.
Waiting for him to come
(with his two bright eyes)
and walk the rest of the way
with them to school.
The eye that can’t see
the outside world
communes at night
with the other eye:
easier to talk
when they’re equal. When
neither of them
is taking in light.
It softens what that eye absorbs,
reminds it hour after hour
as darkness envelops them
that what it beholds in daylight
is temporary. Will be
redeemed. Is not the end.

Day 1,071

Her name was Wafa.
She was eight years old.
She’d just completed
her first day of school.
You can imagine
how excited she was!
School! School
that had not been happening
for three whole years! She’d awakened,
put on her best clothes,
eaten her breakfast. Sat
next to her friends.
Recited, sung, learned
a new way of multiplication.
Now all that remains of her
is a tuft of her hair. Brown,
curly. Hair she’d carefully
brushed in the morning.
A tuft of her hair, in the hand
of a neighbor. Wafa.
Eight years old.
Killed as her father
walked her home
from her school. Killed
before she got to practice
the new multiplication.
Killed before she got to play
with the new friend she’d made.
Her small body in fragments.
No way to find all of them.
No way to piece them together.
Her clean, brushed hair
held out by a neighbor
to the reporter’s camera.
The neighbor asking
the viewers Why?
Why? Why?

Day 1,070

They are holding a funeral
for children who were murdered
long ago, near the start
of the genocide. For some
who were murdered later.
Children not found, not dug up
from the rubble, not buried.
Children whose bodies
were scattered in pieces.
Children whose beds
had become their graves.
Children whose graves
were in more than one place,
whose arms were buried
far from their legs. Their feet.
Children whose names
those who loved them
speak every day. Children
who did not get to learn
multiplication, division.
Children whose deaths
were not acknowledged
because their families
were murdered with them.
Because their families
were fleeing, displaced
again and again. Because
there were too many deaths
and too much hunger
and too much sickness
and too much fear.
for the children
and for their own lives,
though it seems
they are still counted
among the living.

Day 1,069

His daughter is ten
but the size
of a child of seven.
Her bones, her muscles, her weight.
She has lost three years.
Three years of growing. Three years
of eating, drinking
cool, uncontaminated water.
Three years of school. Three years
of friendships. Three years
without her grandmother,
her cousins, her aunts.
She’s the height she was
when the genocide started.
She’s starving. Her body
doesn’t know anymore
how to make food into cells.
How to make food into hormones,
blood, a skeleton
that looks its age. How to use
the paltry food they can get —
one meal a day? often just
rice? sweets? no fruit?
no protein? — how to use it
to make her taller. Stronger.
Able to think, calculate math,
dream of her future
the way she would do
if her body were now
as it should have been.

Day 1,068

for Dr. Mimi Syed

Years from now, perhaps
in some other country, the child —
who no longer
will be a child, but a woman
of twenty, twenty-five —
Years from now, walking
along some shop-lined boulevard
in a city with no
bombs, no airstrikes, no
drones overhead — Years
from now, rushing to where
she works, goes to class,
has lunch with a friend —
she may see someone passing
who reminds her of you:
same hair, same glasses, same
swift pace –and remember the hospital
where she was brought
with a bullet lodged in her brain.
Four years old. Mira. Her mother
hearing the doctor — you —
tell her, “I think
she can be saved.” Collapsing
in tears of relief. Mira:
four years old. Emerging
from surgery: able to see,
hear, speak. Months later,
in her tent, showing you
how she has learned again
to walk. Showing you
her just-painted nails.
Months after that, evacuated
to the country she will
grow up in. Will learn
another language, will live there
with her mother. Will have
more care. More rehab. Other
doctors. One
after the next. Your face, in her mind,
fading and fading. Lost
in a haze of memories
she will not want to keep:
until that moment. Until
just then, seeing that stranger
walk past her. Some afternoon
in a future we can only imagine.

Day 1,067

with gratitude to Eyal Weizman

Bulldozers move over the dirt,
picking it up, depositing it
somewhere else. Covering over
fingers, feet, portions
of skulls. Covering over
your grandmother’s tears,
your three-year-old’s cries
in the night. The earth
has become a mass grave.
Ten, twenty feet under the topsoil
a whole world is inhabited:
your friends, your neighbors.
Arguments. Conversations.
Words of kindness. Words
of love: all
buried, all covered over
by fragments of stone, concrete,
sheetrock. The objects
of their solitude, tools
of their desire: deep
in the ground they lie
and will never be found.
Will be bulldozed, hidden.
Taken to where they can’t
be dug up, identified, named.
Added again and again to the wreckage.

Day 1,066

Someone was making a fruit salad
for the children. Peaches,
grapes, cherries. The children
were playing in a makeshift pool
someone had made from a tub
he’d found buried
under some rubble. One kid
at a time, jumping in
and out. The others
laughing, shouting, splashing
those waiting their turn. It almost felt
like a regular day, a day
surrounded by other days,
a day that would be forgotten
because it was so simple.
Ordinary. Someone’s father
was making a fruit salad,
carefully trimming slices of peach
away from their pits. Then
came the airstrike. Then
was the end
of the excited shouting. Then
the tub overturned:
water and legs, hands, hair
spilling over the ground.
Shreds of ripe summer fruit,
too, everywhere.

Day 1,065

The boy, fourteen or fifteen, digs
through the rubble
of what may have been
his home. He has walked
all this way
from the tent camp he lives in.
Nothing looks the way it did;
but the angle of the hill
he can see from
where he’s standing
looks like the angle he saw
every day from his bedroom
window. He is digging
for his sister. His cousin.
His grandmother. He’s looking
for the smell of dinner
his mother cooked every night:
spices they’d planted
in the garden. Marjoram.
Peppers. He’s digging
for days spent with his two
best friends, digging
to pick up their long
conversation, unending
football games, secrets.
He is looking for morning light.
For the stripe of moonlight
across his bed. For his
grandfather’s voice.