Day 436

The smell of rain contends 
with the stench of death, stench
of rotting corpses, sewage.  Rain
carves rivers through ruined streets;
children play in them,
laugh as the sudden current
runs through their fingers.  What sea of grief
will this water spill into?  Whose
lives will it carry, whose memories,
whose histories?  What words
will be drowned there?  What thoughts
that will never be spoken?  Whose
love, whose touch, whose learning,
whose despair, whose tormented nights
have become this sludge, this debris? And what
will remain when the sun dries the land,
when the children’s laughter is silenced,
when everything sinks back into dust?

Day 435

What he wanted to do more than anything
when he could still see
was to build things:  houses, bridges, schools.
He would sit on the floor for hours,
balancing one block on top of another.  
At school, he was the one who built the sets
when there was a play.  At home, he made a shelter
so he and his brothers could play outside
even in rain.  Now there’s no house,
no school, no shelter.  Now there are no blocks
to build with, just slabs of concrete lying at angles
on unrecognizable streets.  He would build
a neighborhood, build a city, rebuild all the cities
if only he could. He sits in a tent, rain dripping steadily
through the rain fly.  Now that he’s blinded,
how will he see the way one board fits
against another?  Can his hands 
teach him the shapes of things?

Day 434

The infant is six months old.
He has no mother, no father,
no one has been found yet 
to take him in.  The surgeons
have operated on his wound,
have kept him in the hospital
for two days.  Now the hospital
has been told to evacuate; though
the doctors are staying, they are
rolling the patients out.  Where
will they send him, this
six month old with no
parents?  Who will there be
to hold him, soothe him? Who
will clean his wound, and with
what water?

Day 433

A girl finds a pen, draws a picture
of her house:  her house the way it was.
Her house with its yellow curtains, her house
with brightly painted rooms, with someone
always in the kitchen, with children
sitting on the rug, with a mother
bringing them a bowl of fruit
and a father sitting at a desk, writing.
The pen has been half-buried
in the dust; she wonders
for a minute who it used to
belong to, what they did
with it.  She draws.  With each line
she makes, the house grows
whole again:  an uncle now
sits in a large blue chair.
Two cousins have come to the door.
Steam rises from a pot on the stove.
Outside the windows, trees:  orange trees,
olive trees, jasmine, a rosebush
with a yellow rose. She draws and draws.
Night may fall, she thinks; morning may come
and still she will be bringing back her house:
her street, her neighborhood, even her school.
It’s all coming to her again, with each line
her life resurrects itself.  But the ink
grows pale, the pen starts leaving
large empty spaces on the page. 
Soon there will be nothing left
to draw with.  Soon whatever 
she hasn’t drawn will be condemned
to remain in the ghost-world.

Day 432

There is a city beneath this city.
The street workers sweep the debris,
pile it against the rubble.  Under the rubble,
those who lived here live out the lives they knew:
the ones who sat talking for hours in cafés,
the ones who taught school, the old ones
who sorted through memories, the children
who chased each other up and down staircases.
In the unseeable city beneath these ruins,
people hurry to work, stopping to greet a neighbor;
a doctor holds her stethoscope to a boy’s chest,
listens closely to his breathing;
the smells of cooking, the sound of lids
placed on pots, voices responding
to voices whose words
can’t be made out.  In the ghost city
under the rubble, a writer
sits at a desk and writes. Here we are,
we who have lost everything appears
clearly on the page.  And still
we are telling the story.

Day 431

All the infant knew of this world
was six hours lying on his mother’s body.
No water to clean the blood from his skin,
the sticky fluids, the meconium.  The cloth
he was wrapped in was his brother’s shirt.
Born in a tent, he was killed in a tent.
He looked into his mother’s eyes.
He heard his sister’s voice, his brother’s.
They stroked his head.  They held
his small hands, laid thin blankets
over him, parted the flap of the tent
so he could take in the opaque particulate air.
Waited while he slept off the work of being born,
watched as he began learning to breathe,
to see, to make sounds.  What he knew
of this world was six hours 
of love; but also cold,
trembling, his mother’s trembling.
Her empty breasts.  The sudden dark
that engulfed them all together, then sent him back
out of this life to a blankness
he had just emerged from.

Day 430

A mother goes to Cairo with her daughter
so the child can have surgery for her leg,
destroyed by shrapnel.  Somehow
they have been given permission 
to leave.  She goes, leaving
her other children behind
with their father, knowing
she won’t be able to get back,
sick with fear every day
that a bomb will kill them, that
one of them will lose a leg,
an arm.  She sits in a chair
in the hospital room
thinking about the brutal choice
she has had to make, listening
to her daughter talk on the phone
with her brothers as though
they were simply on vacation,
as though this were some ordinary
time, as though every word
they speak were not in danger
of being the last.  Outside
the window of their room,
birds fly high in the sky.
If they’re fast, if they don’t
tire, if no drone
severs their wings, they will make it 
across the borderless air.

Day 429

What she loved best was to dance.
Once her dreams were populated
with pliés, jetés, toe shoes,  
extravagantly lit stages.
Now shrapnel inhabits her spine,
one leg is gone, the other paralyzed.
She rolls her wheelchair through dust,
watching other children run.  Sometimes
she tries to stand, pulls herself up
with her arms, which are still
strong, which still
belong to her.  At night she waves her arms
through the air as though
they could propel her through time,
through distances.  In darkness her arms
dance like wind,
trees, flame.  Sudden explosions,
the pain of loss. Then she sees
for a moment it’s possible
they could tell the whole story.

Day 428

(from a photograph)

A teenage boy stands in the ruins of a street
holding a young cat.  The cat, certainly born
to a starving cat mother in these last
months, is thin, even bony.  The boy too
is bony.  He cradles the kitten
as though she were everything
he ever loved.  The kitten looks
at him as though asking what world
this is that she has come into: nothing
to eat, no water, no warmth.  How
she has found her way to him
we don’t know.  What we know
is that he, fourteen or fifteen years
old, is also hungry.  His head 
is bandaged; what wounded him
may well have taken out his family.  The cat, too,
may have no mother:  hunger,
infection, the fatigue of caring
for a litter and finding nothing
to eat?  The kitten stares
at the boy, something
in his eyes she recognizes.  Is it
loneliness? desperation? A kind of love
beginning between them.

Day 427

The girl puts her hand on her brother’s shoulder,
reassures him she’ll be all right.
She’ll be the one to go out looking
for bread.  Her brother is tired.  All afternoon
he’s been pulling bodies out of the rubble:
friends, neighbors.  The girl
puts on her brother’s sweater, the one
sweater they have between them.  
She steps out into the early darkness,
walks past tents where people sit
talking about their day, past
children crying, half-dressed, cold.
Past a woman sitting alone, singing
something that sounds like a dirge
or a lullaby.  Walks past people
carrying empty pots and a boy
who is eating half a banana
and looks at her, breaks off
a piece, offers it to her.  She takes
it, tastes its sweetness.  Out there
beyond the tents the sky
is vast. A thin crescent moon,
almost golden, hangs over the distant hills
amid a few stars.  It’s the last
thing she sees before the explosion.