Day 1,130

Imagining Dr. Abu Safiya

Kind pediatrician, are you
still alive? In the bleak cell
where they’re keeping you,
do you think of the children
you cared for, all those years?
The one who was brought to you
with a bullet in his neck. The one
whose right leg was half-severed
from his body. The girl whose hand
was shattered, who loved
to draw. Before the guards
break into your thoughts
to beat you again and again,
do you remember the ones
you saved, the boy
who sat up after the surgery
and looked at the bullet
you held in your hand?
The boy who slowly
relearned to walk
on both his legs? The girl
whose mother brought you
the drawing she made of you,
months after she lay
in her hospital bed, you
tenderly holding both
her small hands in yours?

Day 1,129

In the pit of night
a rat bit your child’s toe.
He woke, screamed. You
opened your eyes
to see the rat hurry
across the floor of the tent,
already starting to flood with rain.
Your little boy’s blood
staining the rainwater.
You take an edge of the blanket
and wipe your son’s toe. Little toe,
perfect toe: what
will you put on it
to keep it from getting infected?
You have no ointments, no medicines.
Not even a strip of gauze
to wrap it in. Rain
is beating against the flimsy walls
of the tent. Your child still crying.
His face contorted
in pain. In fear. Will
more rats come? he’s asking you.
If I sleep, will they come
and bite me again?
You would lie in order
simply to comfort him,
to let him fall asleep peacefully again,
but you can’t do it. All
you can do is hold him
and rock him, there
on the watery tent floor;
there in that place, targeted
by more instruments of torment
than you could name.

Day 1,128

in solidarity with Abubaker

You’re searching for your friend,
the friend you knew
since you were small, when
you played together
on the beach, in the dirt
in your front garden. You’re
searching for the friend
you went to school with, played
football with on the field
a short walk from your house.
He’s not there on the field.
Not anywhere you can find him.
Scattered pieces of him
are buried in dust, hidden
behind stones. Where
is his bright smile? His
powerful kick that could drive
the ball nearly across
the whole field
into the goal? Have they gone
to feed rodents? Insects?
He was your friend. Murdered
while playing football. Fifteen
years old. Everything
he practiced so hard for
gone.

Day 1,127

How many children murdered this week?
Enough to fill a classroom, a classroom
that’s been, itself, destroyed. One girl
in her tent, eating her breakfast.
One boy walking to get wood. Another
walking to get water. A girl
sitting beside her friend, showing her
the book she’d been reading. Her friend
killed also. The book
stained with their blood, unreadable.
This four-year-old
on his grandfather’s lap
at a café the grandfather
took him to, to distract him.
This teenager, who brushed
and brushed her long hair,
strafed. Shredded. Her hair
still shiny, streaming
behind her in the dust
from her bloodied head. How many
children? How many desperately
grieving parents? How many more?

Day 1,126

Rimas al-Madhoun

The girl
shattered in fragments
before her father’s eyes.
Seventeen years old.
Living in a tent
in the encampment.
Displaced how many times?
The bomb released.
The girl in pieces. Her body
exploded. An arm here,
a leg there. Fingers.
Feet. Her head.
Her beautiful smile.
Shattered. Shredded. Her father
standing beside the tent, holding
one of her arms. How many times
had he held that arm? his child
learning to walk,
to ride a bicycle, climb a tree,
take one cautious step
after another
on a high narrow ledge.
How many times
had he placed a hand
on that arm
to guide her through a crowd
at a busy market,
help her balance herself,
stop her from some
impulsive act,
in solace, in comfort, in reassurance?

Day 1,125

Once you dug
through the rubble of your home
to find the necklace
your grandmother had given you.
How is it possible
that you found it? Shiny
golden chain with a locket
on it, that she gave you
when you turned twelve.
She died a year later,
before the genocide.
After the bombing
you dug and dug.
Two friends and two
of your brothers
dug with you. At last
you saw something
catch the light:
shiny golden chain,
golden locket
with pictures inside
of your grandmother
and grandfather.
More bombings.
More rubble. Your brothers
gone, the friends
who dug with you
gone. Now the necklace
is all you have. You never
take it off. Your grandparents
stay with you, move
with you from tent to tent,
displacement to displacement.
This, you tell your one
remaining sister, is how
you’ll be identified
if you too are martyred:
shiny gold necklace, gold locket
catching the light. Even
if the rest of who you are
is scattered among the ruins.

Day 1,124

She told her mother
she was going to buy bread.
Bread to have with the soup
her mother was making:
a vegetable soup, a handful
of lentils. The girl knew
there wouldn’t be enough
for her parents, her grandfather,
the two uncles who lived with them
in the tent. She knew
it would help to have bread
to stretch the meal farther,
to feed her pregnant mother,
her uncle healing from
a head wound. She was going
to buy bread. Only bread.
That’s what everyone said
at her funeral. Bread
from the woman who baked it,
sold it from a small table
outside her tent. That’s all
the girl had been doing:
walking from her tent to another.
That’s when the soldier, sitting
and smoking in a room
in some other place, caught sight
of the girl. Inhaled. Ordered
the quadcopter to position itself
above her. Exhaled. Commanded it
to fire.

Day 1,123

Sixty-eight million tons of rubble
lie over your land.
The breath of your children, your grandparents,
teachers, doctors, farm workers,
preparers of food. Sixty-eight million
tons of waste: walls, ceilings, floors.
Weddings. Births. Funerals. First days
at school. First words. First steps.
You look out to where there were fields,
orchards, planted rows of vegetables:
everything gray. Everything jagged.
Everything covered and hidden.
Sixty-eight million tons
that had been cities, hospitals,
schools. Cafés where people met
to speak of the days they lived,
the books they read, the work
they did. Sixty-eight million tons
of everything that had been built
over the years, over the ages,
built with love, reverence, care.
You stand looking out at the grayness.
You imagine the world stirring beneath
what you see. One day, you tell
your daughter, standing beside you,
this will be cleared. We will work
to clear it, to bring what is beneath this
back to life.

Day 1,122

from a photograph

Behind the small child
sitting alone on a pile
of debris, a dog. A light brown
dog, shepherd-like. The dog
looks gentle. Young. The child,
too, is young: maybe
two-and-a half. Maybe
three. They might
have come into this genocide
at the same time.
No adults around,
no one but a child
who looks as though
he could be lost, and a dog
who also looks lost. Both
look hungry. Both
look tired, as though
they’d been walking
aimlessly about, maybe
looking for food, maybe
looking for anyone
they used to know.
Did the dog belong
to a family? Was she
loved, fed, sheltered?
Played with? Did she,
after this photograph
was taken, move closer
to the child, lie down,
sigh deeply the way dogs do,
offer some unthreatening gesture
of friendship? Protection?

Day 1,121

Bring me a sunflower
your grandmother said to you
shortly before she died. There
in the tent, in the rainy encampment,
rivulets of sewage and rainwater
flowing past where she lay,
sick, unable to walk, in her final
days. Bring me a sunflower
she repeated, as though
you were living again
in the house by the fields in Khan Younis
where she and your grandfather,
all their lives, grew strawberries,
oranges, dates, grapes. A sunflower:
bright like the sun. Like
daylight after a tortured
night. A countenance
that would smile on her. A
remembered embrace. A
kind of paradise. Its tall
stem, its petals
revolving around a center
composed of thousands of tiny
single flowers. A world
of flowers, a world
like the world she’d
lost. A flowered world
she could lose herself in,
lose her dying in, forget
for a moment the bombs,
the drones, the starvation.
Bring me a sunflower:
as though she had no other
language remaining. No other desire.