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 woman – 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?

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.