Day 1,045

She’s eight months old now,
the child born over a year
after your first child died,
eight months carried
in your womb. Three days:
all of you crushed airless
under the rubble. His father and you
survived by some miracle,
pulled out weak and bleeding,
bones shattered. The baby
nearly ready to be born,
cut without heartbeat
from your body. Sometimes,
lying awake at night,
you talk to him. Speak
the name you’d have
given him, tell him
about his sister. Sometimes
you tell her about the brother
she would have played with,
laughed with, learned from.
This morning a woman asked you
how many children you have.
Two, you told her.
But the genocide
deprived them
of each other. One
here. The other
never arrived.

Day 1,044

Who will take care of this child
now that his mother
cannot cross the border
for the surgery she needs?
Months of waiting. Permission
promised. Denied. Appealed.
Promised again and denied again.
Meanwhile the cancer
does not ask permission. Crosses
the border of this organ. That one.
Colonizes. Pursues. Consumes.
The child brings water and food
to his mother, but he cannot save her.
At night he hears her moaning
in pain she has tried to contain all day.
Who will care for him? Many
in other tents have offered. Meanwhile
they lie together, awake
in the dark, while the invaders
consider their moves.

Day 1,043

Umm Atta Al-Nashash

Every day she searches
for the remains of her sons.
Four of them, all
martyred, all buried
somewhere under the rubble.
Four of them. She’s seventy-five.
Tired. Hungry. Every day she combs
the area where they were killed,
looking for anything she can find
that she might hold in her hands:
a fragment of a shirt, a shoe,
some strands of hair. All those years
they were children. Students. Fathers.
All those years they cared for her,
brought her food when she was sick.
Took her to visit the graves of their father,
their grandparents. Laughed with her
at the silliness of their own children.
Where is the son with the beautiful voice?
The son who could fix anything
that was broken? The son
who woke early to tend his garden?
The son who built his own house?
All day she looks for a sign
that they lived in this world.
That they touched the earth. Knew
sunlight, wind, water.  That
they have not disappeared
from this life without leaving a trace.

Day 1,042

The child stands and watches
as neighbors dig through the rubble
searching for bodies. This
was her street — no longer
a street but a pile of rocks,
shattered concrete. Somewhere
near here — she can’t
recall exactly — was her house.
The house she lived in
with her parents. Her brothers.
Her grandmother. Somewhere
near here was the house
her friend lived in, the friend
she walked to school with
every morning. She watches them
dig. Everything buried
so long ago. Why
now? she wonders.
There are no
machines: some are digging
with shovels. Some
witch bare hands. What
will they bring to the surface,
she wonders: her mother’s
smile? Her tiny sister’s
hand, waving to her
from the window? A song
she danced to? The shape
of her days? A shaft
of sunlight on the patterned
rug? The cat
who slept in her lap?

Day 1,041

How will this young mother
keep her newborn infant alive
when she has so little milk?
No formula. No diapers.
She wraps her tiny daughter
in cloth torn from an old shirt.
Wraps plastic around the cloth.
Tears another strip of cloth,
another. Her infant is so small,
a single shirt makes seven diapers.
A neighbor whose child
is a few months older
offers to nurse her baby
when she can’t. Assures her
the milk will come in. Someone else
has more cloth. Someone
has a clean blanket, someone
brings bread and vegetables
for the mother. Her tent fills
with women, with care
for her tiny daughter.
She holds her, kisses her head,
her perfect hands. Her fingernails.

Day 1,040

It is time now
to teach the children
a song. They’re gathered
outside the tent, sitting
cross-legged on the dusty ground.
Some of the older ones
are holding younger ones. Some
who are blind or bandaged hold
the hands of their friends or siblings.
Everyone expectant. Everyone excited
to hear the first line the teacher
will sing. Repeat it in their small
high voices. Add to it
the second line,
the third. Overhead, the drones
do not stop their insidious mission.
The heat of summer intense, the stench
of raw sewage and rotting flesh
pervading the air around them. Still,
what the children are doing now
is learning a song their teacher
is teaching them. A song
about birds, about
the sea. What else
should they do but sing?

Day 1,039

Tell me this will end, the girl
says to her brother. Tell me,
she says to him without words,
lying next to him
in their dark
tent, adjusting the blanket
a little so his small feet
are covered, Tell me
the drones will stop hovering
above us, the explosions — distant
or near us — will cease, and we will hear
birdsong again and the buzzing
of insects. Tell me
our mother will survive. Tell me
she will not disappear
the way our father did
and our older sisters.  Tell me-
because you were born
in this genocide, so you’ve known
nothing else- tell me
what’s real is that the sun
still shines, the tide still
moves in and out, the heart
remembers to beat. Tell me —
though you’re too young
to have many words — the red ball
we were playing with yesterday
will still be in its place
when we walk out of this tent
this morning, and you’ll
pick it up in your
small hands sticky with sweat
from the summer night, toss it
into the hill of sand we made,
run on your sturdy little legs,
laugh, pick it up. Toss it
again. As though play
were all there is.  Were what
we are living for.

Day 1,038

The girl sits in front of her tent
learning English vocabulary.
She’s ten. No real school
since the genocide started,
but her hunger to learn
is as deep as her hunger for food.
She learns by heart names
of the things she encounters
each day: Drone. Tank. Sniper.
Smoke. Repeats them to herself.
Amputee. Pain. Skeleton. Skull.
Burial, she learns; and
the terms for kinship. Uncle
and cousin and aunt. Great-
grandmother. Buried, she says
to herself: all buried. All
under dirt. Under the earth? she
wonders. She’ll ask
her one older sister still living
which would be more correct.

Day 1,037

from a photograph

On the rubble of what was known
as the Italian Tower
in Gaza City, an artist
has painted the portrait
of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya.
The wall nearly toppled.
Cracks in the concrete
his face
looks out from. One
lengthy crack
diagonally across
his neck, as though
the bomb that hit the tower
deliberately hit the portrait
to make it look
like he’s being strangled.
The doctor himself — his
portrait —
has become part
of the rubble: his eyes
stare darkly from the broken
wall, taking in
everything that has happened.
Everything that has not
stopped happening.

Day 1,036

The child was in his classroom.
Classroom? More likely a tent.
More likely a structure
without walls, ceiling, foundation.
The child — a boy,
sixth grader — was
in his classroom, writing
in his notebook. Writing
what? Some fact
of history? Geography?
The location of some
river? Or an algebraic
equation: what does X
equal if X minus Y
equals a father? An
older brother? The boy
was sitting at his makeshift desk
in his makeshift classroom
writing in his makeshift notebook
when suddenly a quadcopter
stopped still
in the air above him.
Hung there. Took aim. Fired.
Suddenly. Suddenly the hand
that had been holding the pencil
stalled in midair. Blood
spilling over the page
where he had been writing,
the hand dropping uselessly
by the boy’s side.