Day 1,003

Dr. Abu Safiya
Pediatrician, Kamal Adwan Hospital

Now what is there
to be faced
except death? He
has been tortured, starved,
beaten. Denied medical care.
Denied medicine.
Denied visitors. Denied
the voices of his family.
His lawyer. The pediatrician
so devoted to his patients
that he buried his own
murdered son
wearing his scrubs, so he
could return immediately
to their bedsides — the doctor
who was arrested
after refusing to abandon
his patients — this doctor
could die soon,
in the underground dungeon
where they’ve thrown him.
In darkness. In solitude.
We must not abandon him now
to this hell. We must save
his memory if nothing else.
Somewhere in a past
that remains alive, a man
in green hospital scrubs
is walking through a broken
landscape — the remains
of the hospital that was
his life — toward a tank
where he knows
his oppressors will
shackle him. He walks
with his head high. His eyes
looking straight ahead. His stride
even. Unstopping.

Day 1,002

From the first cells dividing
in their mother’s womb,
they were never separate.
Nine months. Then nine years.
When Moaz looked at Moataz
he saw himself. Same eyes,
nose, mouth. Same hair. Same
voice. When Moataz
looked at Moaz, he saw
his feelings reflected
by his twin: same sadness,
happiness. Same hunger.
Same fear. They had
the same birth. Walked
for the first time
on the same day.
Spoke words to each other
that no one besides themselves,
for a while, could understand.
Moaz and Moataz. Moataz
and Moaz. They played
the same games. Ran
at the same speed. Shouted cheers
for their favorite team
at the same volume. And now
the airstrike has given them
the same death. They’re carried
to their grave (same
grave) in shrouds
that look the same. Same
length. Same weight. Same silence.

Day 1,001

He has lost his whole family:
sons, daughters, grandchildren.
His wife. His brother.
Now he sits outside his tent,
watching a group of boys
kick a ball. Watching another boy
carry water to his mother.
How has it come to this,
that he is the one survivor
of his family? His tent-neighbors
bring him anything he needs,
sit and talk with him
at the end of day. Listen
to his memories, which
are all he has. His memories
are like small stones he arranges
in rows, day after day,
exchanging places
with each other. They taunt him
or comfort him, they
surround him
with sorrow, with
horror, with
longing; but they
do not let him fall.
They do not abandon him
to his loneliness.

Day 1,000

Two weeks after her death
permission was granted
for her to cross the border
for medical care. She
was twelve. She’d
been born with Celiac Disease.
There were foods
she could eat and foods she couldn’t.
No reason she should have
died; it was just
that the feeding sites
had only the foods
she couldn’t digest. She tried
to eat them, grew sicker,
had to choose between
hunger and pain, sickness
and starvation. In the end
her body wasted away. She lost
a third of the growing she’d done;
then the rest of her followed.
In the end, the child
her parents buried
so easily slipped
into her place in the earth.
In the end they carried her
to her grave as they’d carried her
at four or five
into her bed, which, too,
like her body, had
been destroyed.

Day 999

A father and his three-year-old son
go to look at the land
that was theirs, fields
of vegetables, fruit, once
blooming, harvested. They walk
in the summer afternoon, the father
holding his child’s hand, when suddenly
they hear gunshots coming
from a nearby house. A bullet
shoots though the little boy’s
eye, exits through the back
of his head. The father
picks up his son. Then he, too,
is shot. His leg collapses
under him. Soldiers run
toward them, assault them.
The father is screaming at them
to save the boy! Save the boy!
The child still breathing. Bleeding,
but breathing. Save the boy!
Forget about me! the father
is screaming. The soldiers
ignore him. Do nothing
to help the child. A wind
bends the weeds, the bolted
vegetables in the field. When
the father awakens from a brief
unconscious moment, he sees
his son wrapped in a black shroud.

Day 998

Khan Younis

A young woman in a tent —
23 — and her year-old daughter
are killed in an airstrike. They
go down into the rows
of statistics of all
who have by now
been martyred. The mother’s
love, her fear for her child,
her longing for quiet, for sweetness —
gone. The child’s hunger.
Her efforts to stand. To walk.
Her words, or what
sounded like words. Also
gone. Her giggling
at her father, her uncles, the wind
moving through leaves. The horror
of those last moments:
gone. The flames, the explosion.
The awe of their first moments
together in this world:
that too is gone. What they lived
and what they might have lived.
The fragrant breeze
that touches their bodies now,
mothering each of them.

Day 997

They were playing
in front of their tent.
They were walking
to get water, to get
to school, to get food
for their grandmother, their
baby sister, the old man
in the tent next to theirs
who’d had both his legs blown off
in a bombing. They were sitting
in their classroom. They were singing.
They were on their way
to their uncle’s. To a stand
someone had set up
to cut hair. To a place
where maybe there was
enough water to wash
their clothes. They
were playing on a beach.
They were watching the tide
roll in and out. They were
trying to build something
like a house, but the walls
kept slipping, falling,
crumbling, kept being swept
away into the sea. Still,
they kept shaping it. Supporting
it. Fortifying it
with rocks and reeds. That’s
how their mothers
found them, rocks and reeds
lying beside their bodies, their small
dead determined hands
still covered in sand.

Day 996

From a photograph

On a sunny afternoon in June,
children are sitting in rows,
waving at the camera. It’s
their graduation day. From
what the viewer can tell
of their ages, it must be
middle school. One girl
in the front row wears something
someone had made to look
like a graduation gown, a keffiya
around her neck, a rolled paper
in her lap, secured by her hands.
She will not let this
slip away: not the diploma,
not the afternoon, not
the friendships, not the memory
of everything that has happened
before this day. Who will count
how many parents, sisters, brothers
aren’t here to watch? Who will number
the missing books, houses, limbs?
The displacements, the empty chairs
in the makeshift classrooms? Who
will say, in a year, even a month, which
of these children will still
be living?

Day 995

For Dr. Abu Safiya

How many days now
has it been
since they put you in solitary?
What can you measure the time by?
Light comes and disappears
through the narrow space
under the door to your cell:
is that daylight? A naked bulb
someone randomly turns on and off?
If there’s a meal — a piece
of bread, a cup
of watery soup — does that
signal breakfast? dinner?
You are alone and yet
not alone. Your hours
are populated by the screams
of patients you cared for, the sobs
of their mothers, hands
reaching toward you for help,
the voice of your son
lying under the earth
on the hospital grounds.
They crowd the small space
you’re confined in, torment you
with your frailty, your
helplessness, reach
for you in your fitful sleep.
How, if your lawyer
or anyone surviving
from your family
Is ever permitted to see you — how
will you know
the living from the dead?

Day 994

Why, when everyone
seems to have turned their eyes
from you, has your child
been suddenly trapped
under the rubble?
She was playing
in front of an abandoned
building, a building
where once people lived.
She knew to watch the sky;
everyone knows, now,
to watch the sky. Why,
when the world
is using terms like ceasefire,
has nothing ceased? Why
this child, who was delicate,
small, who couldn’t
have harmed anyone?
Now she is buried
under stone and concrete.
Now she is silent
under the ghosts
of those who lived there.
Now they’re accepting her
into their lifeless company.