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.

Day 1,064

from a photograph

A mother stands at the opening
to her tent, which is not
a tent but some pieces of wood
from which panels of nylon
and a patterned bedspread
hang. She stands
holding her son,
ten years old. The boy
is naked except
for what looks like a diaper.
His legs so thin
they can’t bear his weight,
slight as it is. His arms
too: bones, over which
some thin skin is stretched.
You can see his ribs.
How long has it been
since he’s eaten? How long
since he walked? Played?
Sat up by himself? Pulled
a shirt over his head? And
his mother, holding him
as she held him
when he was an infant:
how much longer, she
must be wondering,
until death swallows him down
the rest of the way. Death,
the one thing around them
that eats and eats.

Day 1,063

For Israa and her mother

The child was nine. Killed.
Wrapped in a shroud: you can see
the one hand that is whole.
Her other hand shattered. Concealed.
Hand that turned the pages
of books. Hand that drew
animals, trees. Brushed
her hair. Hand
that wrote words. Stories.
That held forks. Spoons. Cups.
That worked with the other hand
to tie her shoes. All these months
the girl and her mother
simply trying to stay alive:
find food. Fill a bucket
with water. Her mother
grieving, dying
the following day
of injuries sustained
in the same assault. Her mother
who, for a moment,
before falling
unconscious, held
her child’s ravaged hand
in her own. Hand
she had held
from hour to hour
through nights of explosions.
From nightmare to nightmare.
Fear to fear. Now
she will hold it
from one eternity to the next.

Day 1,062

Khan Younis; from a photograph

The boy and his grandfather
are gathering clay, broken rebar,
pieces of metal and brick
from homes that have been
destroyed, to build
a house to replace the one
that is nothing but wreckage.
No cement; they hold things
together with what they can find:
nylon netting against the rain.
What has lain in waste, what
has been nothing but rubble,
will soon be wall, roof, floor.
Will shelter them. Keep them warm
or cool, according to the season.
What they can salvage, they use.
What they can do
with their hands, they do.
Soon they will have
a place to sleep, eat, live. Soon, beside
what the Occupier has blown apart,
a home will rise from the dust.
A window. A door. A place
that is theirs.

Day 1,061

Deir al-Balah

The girl, ten years old,
is being wheeled on a gurney
to the hospital, though it’s clearly
too late. Killed instantly
in an airstrike. Her perfect feet
stick out of the gray blanket
someone has wrapped her in.
Her father accompanies the men
who are wheeling her
through the wrecked streets.
Her face still, that had been
so animated. Her feet
still, that had run, climbed,
jumped. When they stop
at the hospital, her father
bends over her body,
kisses her face, weeps
so hard a brother or neighbor
pulls him away.
His child. His daughter.
His world. A doctor gently
wipes the dust, the remains
of the exploded ground,
from the child’s face.
Her eyelids. The skin
above her mouth. As though
he were wiping off milk
or red stains from strawberries.
No more milk, ever. No more
strawberries. It’s the fingerprint
of death he’s attempting
to erase, and cannot.