Day 1,059

for Tayyem Hamdan
and Abubaker Abed

The child was three.
He was standing with others
close to a bakery. Playing,
like any child. Then
the airstrike: it killed him.
Killed him. He
was a child.
Three years old.
A child no one is talking about.
Writing about. A child
who only wanted to play.
To live. To be with his parents.
So many children murdered,
only a handful named.
A man who grew up
in his city, Deir al-Balah, writes
in anger and sorrow
that no one
seems now to be
thinking about this child.
No one marking his death
but his parents, his family,
his neighbors. Let us now
bear witness
to the brute assassination
of this little boy.
His soft cheeks. His small hands.
His voice. The words he’d just spoken.
The place he would have
grown up in, brutalized also.
Let us never forget him.
Let him not be laid
in the ravaged earth
without our notice. Let us
imagine the touch of his fingers
on his mother’s face. His mother,
who will not touch him again.

Day 1,058

Your kids can’t fly kites.
You can’t have surgery.
You can’t get antibiotics,
insulin, dialysis, phenobarbital
for seizures. Baby formula.
You can’t find diapers for your baby.
You can’t get a prosthetic leg.
Your children can’t go to school.
You can’t get rid of the smell
of sewage. Rotting flesh.
You can’t eat cinnamon,
cardamom, chocolate
today. Tomorrow it will be
something else. You can’t
let your children play outside,
though children are shot
all the time
in the back or the neck or the head
while sitting quietly
inside their tents. You can’t
sit quietly. You can’t
talk loudly. You can’t
stand alone. You can’t
mingle with a crowd.
You can’t watch the sunset.
You can’t fish in the sea.
You can’t celebrate a birthday,
a birth, a graduation, a wedding
without fearing everyone there
will be slaughtered.
You can’t bury your dead.

Day 1,057

They gathered the parts
of your body — the ones
they could find —
into a bag. Gave the bag
to your mother. Your body,
which she had birthed
into this world. Held.
Washed. Tended in fever,
in cold, in heat, in the small
brokennesses that come
to everyone’s body: bruises,
cuts. A bone cracked
in a fall from a bicycle.
Your body, which she
had fed: first
with her own body.
Then with food given by earth.
Her brothers, her neighbors
gathered what they could find. Wrapped
fingers, random pieces
of flesh, even
the sleeve of a dress
you were wearing, in a white shroud.
Placed the shroud
in a bag. Your mother
did not want to look.
She does not want to remember you
as fragments. She wants
to see you, in her mind’s
eye, her heart’s
beating, running
across a field, chasing
your friends, your sisters.
Your legs whole and strong.
Long braids flying down your back.

Day 1,056

If you can’t fly your kite
in the air
you’ll fly it, for now,
a few feet from the ground.
As high as you’re tall. You
won’t stop making them:
you’ll make them
for your friends, make them
for your cousins. One day,
you tell your mother —
fearful as she is
that the sight of your kite
climbing into the air
above your tent camp
will bring down bombs
over you all — one day
you will stand on the beach,
you and every kid you know,
and you’ll all have kites
and they’ll all be flying
so high in the sky,
so many it will be impossible
to see the sky itself. One day:
so many kites flying free.
So many kids unafraid
of bombs raining down on them.

Day 1,055

The children are told
they can’t fly their kites.
Paper kites, kites
they have made, painted,
colored with crayons.
Kites that drifted free
in the sky, tethered
only by string. Forbidden.
Punishable. To be grounded
permanently. Never
to float again
in the bright blue air.
Children who can barely eat.
Whose siblings lack formula, diapers.
Whose schools have been shuttered.
Destroyed. Exploded. Children
who despite everything
have fashioned these kites
from what they could find:
do the occupiers believe
they can stop them from playing?
From rising into the air
with their voices, if not these kites?

Day 1,054

Amra

A ten-year-old girl
shot in the back
while eating. Sitting
and eating. What soldier
in possession of what drone
fixed her in his gaze,
in his deadly ambition?
What soldier — maybe eight
or nine years older
than the girl, probably still
remembering what it was like
to be ten — what kid soldier
in his scrupulously tutored sadism
decided, at that moment,
to kill a ten-year-old child
with a shot to her back?
The girl’s grandmother is sobbing.
What did she do? she asks
over and over. She was eating.
What did she do to them?
Inconsolable. Remembering
the child singing, laughing.
Speaking her first words.
Taking her first steps.
Now lying motionless
on the ground, bleeding
her vibrant bright life
into the dirt.

Day 1,053

You are trying to remember
your father’s voice. Every day
he read to you, every night
before bed. Even
when you were old enough
to read yourself: the last sound
you heard before falling asleep
was his voice, accompanied at times
by the sounds of crickets or wind
or falling rain. He was killed
only a couple of months
Into the genocide. His voice
reading to you at night
in the crowded room
where you all slept in those months
was accompanied then
by the sounds of explosions,
sirens, buildings
collapsing. Screams.
Still, your father
would sit beside you
and read. You’re trying now
to remember the sound,
the cadences, the way
he would change his voice
to perform a new voice
in the story. You’re trying
now to imagine how he would read
the stories you’re reading now.
How you would lie in the quiet dark
pondering the final few words
of the chapter. Not needing
to count your losses.

Day 1,052

The child has spent
the genocide making objects
from wet sand, mud, what clay
she can find. Whenever
she’s sad, afraid,
Ravaged with loss,
she makes something.
She tells this to her mother,
her grandmother, whatever friends
she has who are still
alive. Make something,
she tells them. Cradle the sand,
the mud, in your hands. See
how, minute by minute,
it starts to change. To grow
round. To grow deep. To
begin to be able to hold
something else. Maybe
not food, she says,
when there is none. Maybe
not seeds, if
there are none. Maybe
tears. Maybe a memory
of a cousin, gone now
for two years. Maybe
light pouring down
from the moon. Maybe
cool air that used to be sweet
with the smell of jasmine.

Day 1,051

A bird has gotten caught
in the netting you’ve used
to divide one part of this tent
from another. Old fishnet,
something you threw quickly
in a bag before yet another
displacement, thinking it might
sometime be useful. Now it serves
to separate the part of the tent
where you all sleep
from the part
where you write. Symbolic? But
helpful. And now a bird — a small
bird, young, dark — has gotten trapped
in it toward the top. With each attempt he makes
to escape, he entangles himself more. His wings strain
to flutter but can’t. He squawks, cries, beak grasping the netting
as though he could bite himself free. You stand. Watch.
Wait for the moment that doesn’t come, when the net
might part, unfold, set him loose.
At last you can’t bear it. Brother,
you whisper to him. Fellow victim
of this genocide. Captured here like ourselves. Like our children.
You pick up a knife. Climb up onto
an overturned bucket. Slit the net
where the bird is held hostage. It droops
to the floor of the tent. The bird
hesitates a moment.
Opens his wings. Flies out,
into the open sky.

Day 1,050

What would you be doing now,
you wonder, if the genocide
hadn’t happened? If your parents,
brothers, grandparents
hadn’t been killed? Your friends
not slaughtered? Your professors
not assassinated? What
would you be studying? Who
would be going to classes
with you? What boulevards
would you walk, under what
trees, alongside which
shops, cafés, libraries?
You stand on the hill of rubble
where your house once stood,
look out at the city
you lived in, try to find
one landmark, one view
you can recognize. What
would you be doing
this year, this month,
this moment? If not
standing on the ruins
of your twenty-year-old life,
imagining everything restored?
Imagining what part you will take
in the restoration?