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.

Day 1,060

There are no days anymore.
There is only (what used to be
Monday?) your mother’s body
bleeding out on
the ground; (Tuesday?)
your house destroyed; (Friday?)
the bombing that killed
three cousins; (Sunday?) the baby
dying of his injuries. There are no
months anymore, only (March?) when
will we eat again? (September?)
how long
has there been no school?
(January?) how long
does it take to waste away
from starvation? Time
is not measured by clocks
anymore, not measured
by planners, calendars,
pings on the computer.
It’s measured from explosion
to explosion. By intervals
between displacements. By
standing in line for food
and not getting it. By grieving
and pain and never enough.
By litanies of loss. By a burgeoning list
of names of the dead.

Day 1,059

for Tayyem Hamdan
and Abubaker Abed

The child was three.
He was standing with others
close to a bakery. Playing,
like any child. Then
the airstrike: it killed him.
Killed him. He
was a child.
Three years old.
A child no one is talking about.
Writing about. A child
who only wanted to play.
To live. To be with his parents.
So many children murdered,
only a handful named.
A man who grew up
in his city, Deir al-Balah, writes
in anger and sorrow
that no one
seems now to be
thinking about this child.
No one marking his death
but his parents, his family,
his neighbors. Let us now
bear witness
to the brute assassination
of this little boy.
His soft cheeks. His small hands.
His voice. The words he’d just spoken.
The place he would have
grown up in, brutalized also.
Let us never forget him.
Let him not be laid
in the ravaged earth
without our notice. Let us
imagine the touch of his fingers
on his mother’s face. His mother,
who will not touch him again.

Day 1,058

Your kids can’t fly kites.
You can’t have surgery.
You can’t get antibiotics,
insulin, dialysis, phenobarbital
for seizures. Baby formula.
You can’t find diapers for your baby.
You can’t get a prosthetic leg.
Your children can’t go to school.
You can’t get rid of the smell
of sewage. Rotting flesh.
You can’t eat cinnamon,
cardamom, chocolate
today. Tomorrow it will be
something else. You can’t
let your children play outside,
though children are shot
all the time
in the back or the neck or the head
while sitting quietly
inside their tents. You can’t
sit quietly. You can’t
talk loudly. You can’t
stand alone. You can’t
mingle with a crowd.
You can’t watch the sunset.
You can’t fish in the sea.
You can’t celebrate a birthday,
a birth, a graduation, a wedding
without fearing everyone there
will be slaughtered.
You can’t bury your dead.

Day 1,057

They gathered the parts
of your body — the ones
they could find —
into a bag. Gave the bag
to your mother. Your body,
which she had birthed
into this world. Held.
Washed. Tended in fever,
in cold, in heat, in the small
brokennesses that come
to everyone’s body: bruises,
cuts. A bone cracked
in a fall from a bicycle.
Your body, which she
had fed: first
with her own body.
Then with food given by earth.
Her brothers, her neighbors
gathered what they could find. Wrapped
fingers, random pieces
of flesh, even
the sleeve of a dress
you were wearing, in a white shroud.
Placed the shroud
in a bag. Your mother
did not want to look.
She does not want to remember you
as fragments. She wants
to see you, in her mind’s
eye, her heart’s
beating, running
across a field, chasing
your friends, your sisters.
Your legs whole and strong.
Long braids flying down your back.

Day 1,056

If you can’t fly your kite
in the air
you’ll fly it, for now,
a few feet from the ground.
As high as you’re tall. You
won’t stop making them:
you’ll make them
for your friends, make them
for your cousins. One day,
you tell your mother —
fearful as she is
that the sight of your kite
climbing into the air
above your tent camp
will bring down bombs
over you all — one day
you will stand on the beach,
you and every kid you know,
and you’ll all have kites
and they’ll all be flying
so high in the sky,
so many it will be impossible
to see the sky itself. One day:
so many kites flying free.
So many kids unafraid
of bombs raining down on them.

Day 1,055

The children are told
they can’t fly their kites.
Paper kites, kites
they have made, painted,
colored with crayons.
Kites that drifted free
in the sky, tethered
only by string. Forbidden.
Punishable. To be grounded
permanently. Never
to float again
in the bright blue air.
Children who can barely eat.
Whose siblings lack formula, diapers.
Whose schools have been shuttered.
Destroyed. Exploded. Children
who despite everything
have fashioned these kites
from what they could find:
do the occupiers believe
they can stop them from playing?
From rising into the air
with their voices, if not these kites?

Day 1,054

Amra

A ten-year-old girl
shot in the back
while eating. Sitting
and eating. What soldier
in possession of what drone
fixed her in his gaze,
in his deadly ambition?
What soldier — maybe eight
or nine years older
than the girl, probably still
remembering what it was like
to be ten — what kid soldier
in his scrupulously tutored sadism
decided, at that moment,
to kill a ten-year-old child
with a shot to her back?
The girl’s grandmother is sobbing.
What did she do? she asks
over and over. She was eating.
What did she do to them?
Inconsolable. Remembering
the child singing, laughing.
Speaking her first words.
Taking her first steps.
Now lying motionless
on the ground, bleeding
her vibrant bright life
into the dirt.