Day 1,013

Where is your sister?
Did her body explode in fragments
when a bomb projected her
into the air? Did she lie
buried under the rubble
of your house for hours,
even days, before
her breath stopped
for the last time?
Does the rubble
still cover her?
Is she flesh or skeleton?
Did someone throw her
into a mass grave? An
unmarked grave? A grave
with a number instead
of a name? Did soldiers
find her, shackle her, drag her
into their vehicle, throw her
into a prison cell, where
she crouches now in a
cramped space, with rotten
food, filthy water? Where
is the sister who sang
to you, whispered to you
the names
of her crushes, drew
portraits of everyone
she loved? How, without
knowing whether she’s
dead or alive, can you
know how to grieve her?

Day 1,012

Osama Al-Shafi

First his horse was killed
in a shelling: gentle, faithful horse
who had pulled the cart
the man depended on
to sell his small goods,
to make a small living
for his family. A month
after the horse lay dead,
the man started flying into rages,
breaking windows, punching walls.
Shouting at his wife, his father.
Then one day he told his little son
they were going to take a walk
to buy candy. He hoisted the child,
just two, onto his shoulders, began
walking in one direction; then
suddenly shifted. Started
walking east instead, toward
the yellow line, toward where
soldiers were standing. Waiting.
They walked. The child
sitting on his shoulders.
The soldiers approached.
The father kept walking toward them.
Nearly a thousand days of trauma
had clouded his mind; the loss
of his horse, his livelihood,
pushed him over the edge.
He went on walking, walking.
The child terrified, silent.
We know what happened then
only from the soldiers’ cigarette burns
on the child’s flesh, the child’s
broken sentences, his nightmares,
his vomiting. We know what happened
only from that, and from the father’s
absence — the child brought back
to his mother after a whole day,
but not back as he was; perhaps never
to be back as he was before. And his father:
disappeared into confusion,
terror, dissociation. Still disappeared.

Day 1,011

Your one-month-old
daughter was killed.
Killed. When she’d just
emerged from the womb!
Just looked deeply at you
twice, three times,
with her dark blue eyes
that might have remained
that color or turned
another. She
took you in, understood
that you were her source,
her warmth, her sustenance,
her tether to the world.
How can that tether be broken?
How can those little hands
that were only just learning to grasp
be stiff now? Unmoving?
Those perfect fingernails,
eyelashes, toenails? You
learned by heart every inch
of her body; now
that’s the only place
she’ll continue to live.
Her father martyred.
Her grandmother.
Your heart, filled with her
and emptied of her
at the same time.

Day 1,010

The father was holding
his infant son
after the airstrike.
He had held him like that
for months, the baby’s head
on his shoulder,
little feet dangling
out of the blanket. As
the father carried
the small still body
to the hospital, he thought
to himself that his child
didn’t feel all that different,
wasn’t cold or stiff.
There was blood
where the shrapnel
pierced his heart; but the baby
had bled before
and had always survived.
The father found himself
setting his child
on the ground, pressing
an ear to his tiny chest,
listening for a heartbeat.
Listening again. Again.
Saying, then shouting,
the child’s name.
He picked up
his son, kissed his small
face. Now life
began spilling out
of the child, first slowly,
in droplets; then all at once.

Day 1,009

from a photograph

It looks like a quiet stream
flowing between banks of sand
on a beach, behind which
you can see
bombed buildings where once
people lived their lives.
It looks like a stream
where a boy sits, dressed
for summer. You might think
his next act will be
to wade in the stream,
dip his feet in cool water,
maybe to walk, parting
the water, downstream
for a while. Meet others
doing the same. But
it isn’t a stream: it’s
a pool of sewage
draining down
from the tent camp he lives in.
Its stench not knowable
from the photograph, somehow
tolerated by the boy,
who is glad, for just
now, to be
sitting alone, to feel even
the least breeze
blowing in from the sea,
this momentary respite
from crowding and fear
and the buzz of drones …

Day 1,008

from a photograph

A girl, maybe twelve,
in a gauzy pink dress
with a floral pink shawl
at her shoulders,
a pink flowered barrette
in her long dark hair,
stands between two
seated women – her
mother and grandmother? –
on what may have been the terrace
of the house they’d lived in.
All we see is their backs,
the black chairs each of the women
sits in. The ruined city
before them: rubble,
cement blocks, piles
of wreckage stretching
west to the sea. How many
lie buried under that wreckage? How
many children? How many
still not counted, still
not found, still not
uncovered? They’re looking out
toward the sea, the ruins
close to the sea
pinkish now from the setting sun.
What fraught celebration
have they come from
or are about to go to?
A wedding? A birthday?
The women, too, are dressed up:
pearled embroidery on the shoulders
of the one whose left arm
is around the girl. Who, what
are they missing now,
as they look out
on what has become
of the city they lived in?

Day 1,007

The father bends over the body
of his six-year-old son, just
murdered. The child’s face
is all the shroud
does not yet cover:
small face, not yet pale
with death. The father
rocks back and forth,
moaning. Weeping.
He is not ready
to lay his son in the earth.
to say goodbye.
How could he be? Only yesterday
he and his son
were walking together,
talking, playing ball.
Only yesterday the father
was thinking how much
the boy had learned, even
without school. How much
he knew about drones,
quadcopters, uniforms. How adeptly
he counted the number
of friends and cousins
who’d died. Now his number
is added to theirs. Now
he will never be older than six.

Day 1,006

Once you were able to walk
from your house
to your grandmother’s house
on summer mornings
and sit at her table
eating fruit from her garden.
Once you watched out her window
for birds: red birds, yellow birds.
You heard them call to each other
as your cousins began to call
to each other from their
upstairs rooms, and your uncles
walked through the kitchen
on their way to work.
Once you thought
this was the way things were:
sunlight, fragrance of jasmine
as doors opened and closed, footsteps
of those you loved …

Day 1,005

Dr. Abu Safiya again

Another day in solitary,
in the windowless cell
where they’re holding you.
Alone, you’re surroundedr
by memories of your patients:
The girl whose arms
were blown to pieces, fragments
of bone and flesh strewn
through the rubble.
Where did they go,
she'd kept asking you.
The boy whose brain
extruded from his skull,
his fixed stare, the button on his jeans
still perfectly fastened.
The starved Infants, the ones
who died being carried
to the hospital, who died in the night,
who died while you’d been
placing their feeding tubes.
You cannot stop seeing them, cannot stop thinking how you might
still have saved them.
They circle you in your airless cell,
cry out to you when
you try to sleep. One — a teenage girl — places her ghost-hand on yours.
There's nothing to do
for us now, she whispers
to you in a voice hoarse
from screaming. Save yourself. Save yourself, Doctor. Every day there will be
others who need you.

Day 1,004

The four year old child
was sitting in her tent
when the explosion came
that paralyzed her right side.
One moment she was sitting,
talking, eating. The next moment
only half her body could move.
She had just been learning
to zip a zipper, button a jacket, tie
a shoe. Hold her baby cousin,
rock him in her arms. What
will she do now, with only half
a body that moves? And the other half
silent, still, like a frame
stopped suddenly in a film: a witness
to genocide, a permanent reminder. Will the half
that is still
whisper its desires to the other half?
Will it wait, in darkness, for the touch of water?
Or soft grass? The warmth of sunlight?