Day 416

The doctor lies on a gurney, his thigh shattered,
his small son buried only weeks ago
outside the hospital. His wound, he says,
is no more important than anyone else’s,
His spilled blood no more tragic. He will stay
at the hospital, though the bombs keep falling.
I am thinking of pain unmedicated, wounds
festering, infections left to rage 
with no antibiotics. I am thinking of children
who spoke, standing outside another hospital,
nearly a year ago, begging the world
to listen.  “Please take care of us,” they
said.  We have not.  We have not
taken care.  I am wondering, of those, how many
are still alive.  The doctor, his voice
weakened, is promising his colleagues
that tomorrow he’ll work again.  He will not
fail his patients, whatever little he can do
for them. I sit in my still house,
everything quiet around me.  How 
we have failed all of you,
I am thinking:  we whose bodies
are whole.  We who wake and go about
the tasks of the day, we who live
among the living.

Day 415

When night falls, unending night
of winter, you tell everyone you love
goodbye:  those already asleep in the tent with you,
those sheltering elsewhere, those
who have been killed, who have starved,
who have been burned alive.  You look out
through the dust, the contaminated air,
through the darkness of your own spirit,
and you see the one star that is shining.
There in the moonless sky it pierces
the unrelenting dark, sends forth its light
to you where you are.  Across vastness,
across aeons, across narratives
of destruction, it remains. Never forget this,
it tells you.  I am here even when daylight 
and consciousness obscure me.

Day 414

Every day the boy watches the other children
kicking a ball through the dusty corridors
among tents.  Every day he remembers
what it felt like to run, to kick, the moment
of contact with the ball.  Every day his father
tells him it’s okay, he’s lucky to still
be alive — not like your cousins, not
like that boy from school who was good
at math…Every day he looks
in his father’s eyes, sees the sadness
his father’s scolding, his bravado,
is trying to shield.  At night,
in the tent, he feels his father’s body
shaking with sobs he suppresses.  Once,
waking, he saw his father reach
over to him, to where his leg
would have been, and tenderly stroke the cloth,
the cold canvas floor that separates them
from the ground.

Day 413

You come back empty handed one more time,
having gone to find food for the children.
Your breasts too are empty:  the baby
doesn’t cry anymore for milk, and that,
you know, is not a good thing.  Infant
born under bombings, infant swaddled in
fear, displacement, loss. His sisters
hold him, comfort him, while you go out
looking for something to keep you all alive
one more day.  He has been so briefly
in this world, will he be taken back
before he can walk? Sit? Grasp
one tiny hand with the other?  When he turns
his head away, is he looking
toward the mysterious place he came from, 
asking if it will receive him again,
staunch the pain of his hunger?

Day 412

Just when she thought she could walk no farther
her father said they had to walk on.
The air was heavy, rain was about to fall.  The road
smelled of blood, decaying flesh, excrement.
She had to walk, carrying her small brother,
holding her six year old sister’s hand, their father
carrying all that belonged to them, which was
practically nothing.  Rain started to fall:
first a little, then enough to soak everything.
She started thinking what it would be like
to stop:  to set down her brother, to sit
in the rain by the side of the road, to let go
her sister’s hand, to stop her ears from hearing
their crying, to block her father’s voice
telling her walk, walk.  To give up, to give in.
To let the death that was stalking her
like a hungry animal finally have its way
with her, pin her to the ground, back her
against a collapsed wall, slowly or suddenly
consume her.  To go dark.  To stop.  Just
when she closed her eyes for a minute
to see what that blindness was like, she heard
her father starting to sing.  He was singing a song
that matched the rhythm of his walking, a song
he had sung to her when she was small.  She opened
her eyes;  saw ahead of her,
against the devastation, her father’s
back, still strong.  Still upright.  She hoisted
her brother higher onto her chest, grasped
her sister’s hand more tightly.  Above them
a single bird, dipping and soaring
through gray unbroken sky.

Day 411

On the road that is not a road anymore
past the city of broken concrete
a small procession of people
carry empty pots back to where
they are staying, pots they had hoped
to fill with flour, vegetables, cheese.
A woman stops, breaks off
from the others, sits by the side
of the road, wraps her shawl
more tightly around her.  She’s tired,
cold.  She has been walking
a long time. She thinks of her child,
crying from hunger all night:  how
she promised him she’d find food
for him in the morning, how hard
it will be to show him
the empty pot.  She thinks of his small
voice, growing weaker each day.  She thinks
of his arms, how thin they are.  How
when he puts them around her waist
she can barely feel them.  How she is learning
all the ways death can take a child:
quickly — a bomb; a shot to the head —
or slowly, like this, a little at a time.
Chill air.  A metal pot
that couldn’t be filled. A slow procession
past ghosts, past the ghosts of ghosts.

Day 410

Friend, I did not know
you had died.  I did not know
the bombs I heard
were exploding over your house.
I did not see your roof collapse, the walls
of the room where you slept
cave in on themselves, burying you
in your bed.  We’d sat in school
together for years, spoken 
of poetry, of our sisters, of how
we wanted to grow old
together, surrounded by children
and grandchildren, sit on the beach
together: two old women
serene at last, watching
the tide come in, go out, telling stories
about what our lives had been. 
Now your life has stopped forever
and I have to go on
alone, walking among these tents
on sand cloaked in dust.
The salt air we loved
heavy with smoke and the smell
of death, of sewage, of abandoned dreams.

Day 409

Voices are calling from under the rubble.
Some were buried there
an hour ago, some yesterday.
Some have been there
for more than a year. The concrete
grows heavier, bears the weight
of thousands of stories.  Some of the buried are
living, some dead.  Children are crying out
for their parents; parents are calling
their children’s names.  The voices are urgent,
angry, grieving, confused:  a moment ago
we were sitting at our table, sleeping
in our beds, reading at our desks.  Where
is the brown dog
who lay on the rug?  His pained voice,
too, cries from under the crumbled
walls.  He is desperate to find his people,
the ones whose touch comforted him,
the ones he was supposed to protect.  Even
when bodies have turned to dust, when
pieces of bone are all 
that sticks out between fallen
slabs, the voices persist, weeping or screaming.
You hear them in your sleep, you hear them
when you sit in your chair, 
when you walk by the way.
Don’t forget us, they call. Don’t think
you have destroyed us, disappeared us.

Day 408

She is touching the earth
around her ruined house
to see what it tells her.
She has come back
to see what remains.
You are still here, it says, though
you are the only one.
She is touching this ground
for what she knows will be
the last time:  tomorrow
she will leave for another place,
she will gather her few things
in the backpack that’s all
she has left of her child
and be displaced again.
You will remember me
 always, the dark soil is saying,
Don’t fear that you will forget me.
Here was where you planted
orange trees with your grandfather.
Here was where your grandmother
took her last breath.  She reaches
into it with her fingers, brings it
to her nose to take in
its fragrance, puts a small handful
in the pocket of her coat.  You are all
I take with me, she says; but already
she’s afraid the dirt is turning
away from her, holding its own
grief, not wanting to keep her.

Day 407

The father never asked for anything
from his children — not a cup
of tea, a blanket, nothing.
This is what they like to say
about him:  the father
would give his food
to his grandchildren, would bandage
the oozing wounds of the man
next door, would give water
to the cat before drinking himself.
After the bombing, when the father
lay on the floor, and his daughter
took off her headscarf to wipe
his blood, over and over,
the father kept asking her if she
was all right.  If she was tired,
cold, sick to her stomach
from all that bleeding.  And the daughter
kept shaking her head, No, No! 
until the last of his veins
soaked the rug, until her father had
no sight, no voice, no hearing.