Day 366

(the second year begins)

Don’t say we are dead.  Tell 
whoever you’re speaking to
that we walked the beaches, planted gardens,
held one another’s hands with tenderness on summer nights,
watched our children grow, sang to them,
bathed their soft bodies at the end of the day,
stirred pots in our kitchens, stood
at the window taking in the fragrances of herbs,
waiting while the moon rose above the rooftops.
Don’t speak of our deaths without remembering
that we lived, that we loved the sea, that we leapt
with joy under its waves, fell asleep
listening to its rhythm.  Don’t forget 
that we tasted peaches, strawberries, melons
and felt the sweet juices run down our chins.  Did I
mention the breeze?  The rain?  The first
rains of autumn?  The smell of earth
when the rains dried, when sunlight
illumined the drops that still clung to the branches?
Say we took all this in. Say we refused
to leave ourselves behind.  Say we were alive
the way everyone is alive, that we told stories
about what we saw and heard, that when they 
murdered us, each of us bore a world 
away with us; but, like the impression left
in sand when one has been lying for hours
under the sun, the shapes
of our souls persist in the fetid air, the broken
shadows, the shredded fields where we
will not be forgotten.

Day 365

Where are you, small child?
I have looked for you in the blackened air.
I have looked for you in the streets
that are not streets anymore but open tombs.
I have looked for you in the hearts of those
who have destroyed us, and I can’t find you.
Are you in the fallen roof?  The remains
of the hallway? The eyes of your dog
who, miraculously, still lives, perhaps
so she can hold you within herself.  
Every day I feed her what I can.
Today was canned beans, yesterday
a few slices of bread. 

Day 364

A mother bends over her bleeding child.
She has carried him all the way
to the hospital, stepped
over fallen rock, blasted concrete.
How could a child of six
have so much blood in him?
His blood runs like a river
through broken streets.  His blood
swells like the sea, like the rains
that will come.  His blood is a waterfall
that spills from his chest, his abdomen,
drains arms, legs, face; so that
when she lays him down 
on the hospital floor, her hand
cradling his head, he is as white
as the walls, and nothing
in him is moving except his blood
that flows and flows without end.

Day 363

The sky is a shroud over all the land.
The child watches as morning light
comes slowly, slowly, and asks herself
what will be uncovered.  There are bodies
in the road.  There is blood
in the soil.  There are faces
in the high trees, eyes of those
who have been killed.  The child
sits, watches.  Everyone else in the tent
is asleep.  She speaks a few words
to the darkness about to be overcome
and holds one hand with the other
as the horses of inevitability
pull in the dawn, gallop now
toward whatever this day will be.

Day 362

The boy wants to go to school
but there is no school.
There’s a tent where somebody’s mother
is teaching songs, but his mother is afraid
to let him go there.  He tries to remember
what it was like to go to school —
a room with tables, books, chairs —
and he wishes he could have
just one morning again
sitting with his friends,
waiting for the teacher, looking
out the windows to trees, fields,
everything where it was.  Everything
where it used to be.

Day 361

All day this girl has been thinking
about her friend, the one
with green eyes, the one 
who played the flute and sang.
The one who sat up with her all night
after her grandmother died in her sleep,
the one who laughed when the pot of food
they were cooking spilled on the floor.
All day she has been thinking
about her friend, what they 
would be saying now to each other,
what songs they might be listening to.
She has been wondering what pain
her friend was in when she was killed,
or whether it happened so fast
she didn’t have time for pain.
Where are the fingers now
that worked so hard to learn the flute?
All day she has been trying to remember
a verse of one of the songs her friend
sang, and can’t.  It feels to her
like the only important thing
in the world right now
is to remember that verse.

Day 360

The child dug a hole in the ground
and put her doll into it.  
Then a stick, a rock, another rock.
Each thing had a name
of someone dead, the name
of her father, her brother, her mother, her friend.
The doll had her name, it was herself
buried in dust, beside others she loved.
She sat on the ground, staring
at the hole, the weeds she put near it
to honor them all, and herself
among them. She kept sitting
there; it was almost night.
Now and then she would smooth
the dust with her hand. She would talk
to them quietly as though she were dead
alongside them, as though they were all
lying there, buried under the stars, telling
stories to each other,
looking up at the jewelled sky.

Day 359

The wind is so strong
it blows away
memories, blows away words,
tears, the sound of flesh
burning, blows away a dream
of horses standing in a field, blue
rosemary flowers, bending
wheat.  The wind has a voice
you know, a voice
that moves through you like 
blood, like a river, like
something rising.  The wind
is so strong it is carrying you
to a place you have
never seen, pushing you,
tossing you.  What you remember
before it began  
was a street, children running,
houses falling, then suddenly everything
dark.  Are you my death
you ask the wind, is this
how you come for me?

Day 358

Once this tree was abundant with leaves.
They have all been scorched, they have dried
and turned brown before their season.
My children’s arms are as thin
as the branches, their eyes
as empty.  All afternoon I have sat
watching my kids and their friends
kick a soccer ball. (Are they
ghosts yet?  Will the dust
they’re playing in be littered tomorrow
with corpses?) I am trying to learn by heart
the shape of this one’s chin, that one’s
cheekbones. The warmth
of their bodies in sleep.  Sound
of their breathing.  If I make of myself
a cloister, a sealed chest, can I hold
what’s imperiled, can I preserve it?
Night is falling now, soon their game
will come to an end.  (Will this be
the last night?   And what
will I do without their bodies?)

Day 357

Two children walk 
through a garden
they’ve made
in the midst of tents.
Vegetables, fruit. How
are they watering them, 
that they’ve grown
so green, so large?
Fragrance of jasmine,
oregano, sage.  Difficult
not to believe hope is useless.
Unbearable to look
at the blank expressions,
the shuffling walks,
the night sky
populated not by stars
but by warplanes. Yet the children
are laughing, running, bending
to look at what was not ripe
just days ago but today
will be harvested, eaten.