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.

Day 1,053

You are trying to remember
your father’s voice. Every day
he read to you, every night
before bed. Even
when you were old enough
to read yourself: the last sound
you heard before falling asleep
was his voice, accompanied at times
by the sounds of crickets or wind
or falling rain. He was killed
only a couple of months
Into the genocide. His voice
reading to you at night
in the crowded room
where you all slept in those months
was accompanied then
by the sounds of explosions,
sirens, buildings
collapsing. Screams.
Still, your father
would sit beside you
and read. You’re trying now
to remember the sound,
the cadences, the way
he would change his voice
to perform a new voice
in the story. You’re trying
now to imagine how he would read
the stories you’re reading now.
How you would lie in the quiet dark
pondering the final few words
of the chapter. Not needing
to count your losses.

Day 1,052

The child has spent
the genocide making objects
from wet sand, mud, what clay
she can find. Whenever
she’s sad, afraid,
Ravaged with loss,
she makes something.
She tells this to her mother,
her grandmother, whatever friends
she has who are still
alive. Make something,
she tells them. Cradle the sand,
the mud, in your hands. See
how, minute by minute,
it starts to change. To grow
round. To grow deep. To
begin to be able to hold
something else. Maybe
not food, she says,
when there is none. Maybe
not seeds, if
there are none. Maybe
tears. Maybe a memory
of a cousin, gone now
for two years. Maybe
light pouring down
from the moon. Maybe
cool air that used to be sweet
with the smell of jasmine.

Day 1,051

A bird has gotten caught
in the netting you’ve used
to divide one part of this tent
from another. Old fishnet,
something you threw quickly
in a bag before yet another
displacement, thinking it might
sometime be useful. Now it serves
to separate the part of the tent
where you all sleep
from the part
where you write. Symbolic? But
helpful. And now a bird — a small
bird, young, dark — has gotten trapped
in it toward the top. With each attempt he makes
to escape, he entangles himself more. His wings strain
to flutter but can’t. He squawks, cries, beak grasping the netting
as though he could bite himself free. You stand. Watch.
Wait for the moment that doesn’t come, when the net
might part, unfold, set him loose.
At last you can’t bear it. Brother,
you whisper to him. Fellow victim
of this genocide. Captured here like ourselves. Like our children.
You pick up a knife. Climb up onto
an overturned bucket. Slit the net
where the bird is held hostage. It droops
to the floor of the tent. The bird
hesitates a moment.
Opens his wings. Flies out,
into the open sky.

Day 1,050

What would you be doing now,
you wonder, if the genocide
hadn’t happened? If your parents,
brothers, grandparents
hadn’t been killed? Your friends
not slaughtered? Your professors
not assassinated? What
would you be studying? Who
would be going to classes
with you? What boulevards
would you walk, under what
trees, alongside which
shops, cafés, libraries?
You stand on the hill of rubble
where your house once stood,
look out at the city
you lived in, try to find
one landmark, one view
you can recognize. What
would you be doing
this year, this month,
this moment? If not
standing on the ruins
of your twenty-year-old life,
imagining everything restored?
Imagining what part you will take
in the restoration?

Daty 1,049

If you forget them
it will be as though
they have died again. Again
and again, every day
you don’t think of their eyes,
their voices, the song
one of them sang
in your third grade class;
the smile another one
had on his face
when you’d walk
through the door.
the bombs that killed them
were falling again,
the planes flying overhead,
releasing their deadly cargo.
As though the ground
were shattering again, their buildings
collapsing. If you forget them
they will mulch into history
like dry leaves, petals
ripped from their stems. Death
stalked them, gripped them,
disappeared them; but you,
who knew them — you
who were friend, cousin,
schoolmate, sister —
you have kept them
with you, have never
released them, have vowed
not to let them be gone.

Day 1,048

Gaza City

A summer’s day. A café by the sea.
People coming to talk,
eat, tell a few stories, catch up
with others they haven’t seen.
Suddenly an explosion. Suddenly
an impact so strong that bodies
are hurled up into the air,
even into the water. When it’s over,
seventeen are dead. Women,
men, children. Students
who had been reading, writing.
Teachers who had been planning
their lessons. Mothers
who’d brought their small children
for a sugary treat,
to distract them
from everything else
the occupier had taken from them.

Day 1,047

No chairs. No desks. No
blackboards. Not even notebooks.
Yet daily the children
come to school, to the tent-school,
to sit inside the tent or outside,
according to the weather.
Three years without school.
Ten, twelve, thirteen displacements.
Some of the children without legs.
Some without arms, without hands.
A few who have lost an eye.
Yet whatever they learned
before the genocide
has not been lost: a girl
struggles with multiplication.
Two digits. Three. Remembering
that she learned it before. Remembering
the calm classroom, trees swaying
outside the windows
in a gentle breeze. The child
who sat next to her, the one
behind her: gone. Gone
with their families. Their
homes. Two digits. Three
digits times three. Slowly,
slowly, it comes back to her.
Multiplier. Multiplicand.
She remembers how, she writes
the product of the numbers
on the sheet of paper the teacher
has given her, torn in five parts,
for five children.

Day 1,046

She used to be able
to stay at home
with her younger children.
Her husband earned enough
so they could all live: eight
children, a house, a garden.
Then the bombing. The house
destroyed. Garden
decimated. Husband
wounded, confined
to a wheelchair. She began
selling beans. Beans
she bags halfway
through the night, then piles
the bags in a cart, wheels them
from tent to tent. The kids
take care of their father
and one another. All day
this mother sells her beans
until she has just enough money
to buy what her children
will need the next day.
All day all she thinks of
is getting her children
one more sunrise.