Day 1,107

for Ezzideen Shehab

A child wanders
over the rubble, looking
for something. His
parents? His brother?
A toy he’s lost? The house
he lived in? Something he can’t
even say the name of,
though he knows
it’s missing? A soldier
captures him in his sights,
aims. Fires. The child
collapses. Blood
soaks the broken ground,
jagged pieces of concrete.
No one runs to claim the body.
No one knows the child’s name.
Another life stopped short.
The soldier takes a bite
of the sandwich he’d been eating
before the killing. A sip
of coffee.

Day 1,106

You are still hungry.  Not
just hungry:  you’re wasting away.
Your arms and legs
are like thin, dry branches
of leafless trees. 
Your body, which should
be growing, is stunted:  you’re
the height of your three-year-old
sister, and you’re six.  Six!
Half your life you’ve lived
in a genocide.  Half your life
you’ve had little to eat
on any day:  some lentils,
a spoonful of rice,
a few greens, maybe
some crumbs of bread.  What chance
is there for you to be healthy?
What chance for your mind
to take in what it could
be taking in?  This
is how the Occupier
is attempting to kill 
a people:  quickly, with
bombs and airstrikes,
and slowly, one deprived meal
at a time.

Day 1,105

for Maryam

Flames all around her.
The building
she’s lived in
consumed by fire.
The child — three
years old —
is screaming. Harrowing
screams. Her mother
near her, also
on fire. Maryam,
trapped in the flames,
watching her mother
burn. A rescuer
dives into the firestorm,
calls for blankets,
water. More screaming.
A tiny child, her whole
body on fire. Watching
her mother burn
to death. Charred.
No longer hearing
her mother’s voice.
Voice killed
by the flames.
Relentless sound
of fire taking everything
in its path. Maryam,
pulled from the flames
by the rescuer. Taken
to a hospital. For now,
surviving.

Day 1,104

Rats in the tent. You wake
in the night to the cries
of your children, rats
biting their feet. You pick up
the broom you use daily
to sweep dust, sand, dirt
from the tent floor; yell
at the rats — three
or four of them — to
get out, chase them
with the broom
through the tent’s flap
into the dark.
Inspect your children’s feet,
wash the blood with water
you still have, comfort their crying.
Think of the antibiotic ointment
you’d use on their feet
if you had some. One more
peril averted, or nearly.
One more reason for vigilance.
Attacks, you think, from the sky,
from behind rubble and underbrush,
and from the filth on the ground.
Nowhere a refuge.

Day 1,103

You would be seven years old now,
my smallest daughter,
killed when you were five.
Five! You hadn’t yet
learned to read, to write anything
but your name. To add simple numbers.
You would be seven: taller, stronger.
You’d be climbing trees,
if we still lived any place
where trees
were standing. You
would be running to school
in the morning, backpack
flapping behind you, calling
to friends on the corner
to wait for you to join them.
You would be wearing the dresses
your sisters would be handing down
to you, dresses they wore
themselves when they
were the age you’d be now
if the genocide weren’t happening.
If there hadn’t been air strikes.
If the bomb hadn’t been dropped.
If the house hadn’t gone dark.
If the fire hadn’t consumed you
before I could reach you.

Day 1,102

You stand
looking out at the ruins
of the city you lived in.
You try to orient yourself:
this dome, that intersection.
This road that led down
to the sea. That
collection of houses.
But all you can be sure of
is wreckage and dirt. Dirt
piled on wreckage. Could
you point to the place
where your mother would wait
for you after school? Where
she would call to you
to stop lingering, to hurry
to get to the mosque,
the market, your
grandfather’s house?
Could you point
to the café
where you told
your oldest friend
your oldest secret? Everything
buried. Everything covered.
Everything you knew
is counting on you now
not to forget.

Day 1,101

for Shaimaa Hussein

How can your brother be living
and dead at the same time?
Felled in a bombing, his pulse
stopped. They declared him
dead. Then, uncannily, a finger
started moving. It moved again.
The doctors revived him. Your mother
stood over him, weeping and talking,
crooning to him as she did
when he was a baby: he was
her baby, coming back
to life. Life? Five months
in hospitals. Surgeries.
Recoveries. Now
he’s home, walking
and eating. But is he
alive? All day he sits,
doesn’t leave the house,
doesn’t want to think
about football, studying, friends.
His life has become
a standstill, a stopped clock. An
empty bowl waiting to be filled.
A blank parenthesis
between a past he can name
and an unnamable future.

Day 1,100

Mohammed Tamous

How many did he pull
with his own hands
out of the rubble? How many
did he talk to for hours, sitting
beside collapsed buildings
where they were buried, through
rainy nights, freezing nights,
reassuring them that their legs
were numb only because
they were trapped;
that their blindness
might be temporary; that others
were sitting beside their children,
their parents, their neighbors.
How many children
without mothers or fathers
did he hold, comfort, carry
to some kind of safety?
How many mothers
whose children no one
could dig up? How many bags
of body parts did he deliver
to waiting families, bowing
his head, apologizing
that that — a bag
filled with flesh, hair, a few fingers —
was all they could gather?
And now he himself
has been killed. Killed
like so many he tried
to save. Killed
when there were others —
so many others! —
he would have gone on saving.

Day 1,099

When they pulled him
out of the rubble, he was covered
with dust and blood. His brown hair
gray with dust, as though his hours
buried beneath the remains
of his house
had aged him. Had made him a man
and not a fourteen-year-old boy.
His mother and sisters
still buried. No hope
they’d be found alive. Friends dead.
Teachers dead. The neighbors
who had been digging, digging,
pulled him out, wiped the blood
from his face, the top of his head.
The boy he was
had been crushed; a man
emerged: raging, grieving.
Now every minute of grief
fuels his rage. His rage
at what’s gone. His rage
that the genocide continues.
His rage at his missing childhood.
His rage at all
his mother and sisters
will never have. Watch
this child; see how his loss
is turned now, minute
by minute, not
to despair but resistance.

Day 1,098

The young man
had gone into the school
where the children were so excited
to be, after such
a long time. He
spoke with them, played
with them, asked them
if they were afraid.
We’re not afraid! No!
they chanted in unison.
Even though they were close
to where the soldiers were.
to the yellow line. No!
We are not afraid!
A day later the young man
was dead. Dead
with his playful laugh.
Dead with his love
for the children. Dead
with his strong hands.
Dead from the soldiers’ fire.
Dead with everything he knew.