Day 466

It was her voice
she first noticed was lost
under the rubble.  No way
to call to her neighbors,
Find me!  Save me!  I’m here.
She lies wedged between
fallen blocks of concrete,
her chest so crushed
she can’t breathe enough air
to make a sound.  What
she can move
is one hand, which
she turns back and forth,
like someone signaling
“stop,” then “come here.”
It’s late afternoon, still light
enough for a while
for the hand to be seen.
She hears the voices
of those she knows
about to give up the search,
listens as though she were listening
from another world to the sounds
of the living.  She turns her hand
faster, faster, and someone’s eye
catches the movement — a trapped
bird?  a torn scrap of paper
blown by the wind? — 
and someone else shouts,
It’s a hand!  And then two, five,
seven people are in there, digging,
lifting the fallen walls caging her,
pulling her out:  hand, arm,
six year old body.  She is surprised,
when, held by a neighbor,
she finally starts crying,
to hear her own voice again. 

Day 465

Two children sit in a tent
made of rags, torn clothing. It’s
raining, rain soaks
the flimsy roof of the tent,
drips through the holes.
The older child
is teaching her brother to read
from an old magazine she found
long ago. No school
for over a year.  The girl
is trying to remember
how her teacher
taught her, pointing a finger
under the words, saying them
for her brother, asking him
to repeat.  They’re hungry, cold.
Between words the girl sits
on her hands to warm them.
Her brother cries when he can’t
get it right.  The magazine
is about things they don’t
understand — engines, cars,
trucks — but there are words
in it, and that’s all
that matters.  Overhead, planes bear
their relentless cargo.  On the ground
between their tent and the next, rain
pounds the decomposed carcass
of a cat or a dog. The girl
takes a pencil stub, writes
words she will teach her brother
in the margin of the page
of the magazine:
Rain, she writes.  Winter,
she writes.  Bomb. Wind.  Dead.

Day 464

Even the trees have been bombed,
the orange trees that were so fragrant,
the lemon trees, pomegranate.
Even the trees have had to bend,
bow, split apart like the arms
and legs of children.  The hillsides
that were green with trees,
the roads over which trees 
made dappled canopies:  all flattened
now, rubble and jagged stones.
At night you can hear the land cry
as wind rips through empty spaces.
Didn’t everything have roots? it
sighs.  Couldn’t it all
grow back, push up
through the ground, bear again
the fruit of its savaged memory?

Day 463

from a photograph that could be the Pietà

A mother sits, holding her child.
The child is maybe ten, eleven.
She’s wearing a white t-shirt, long
sleeves, pajama pants
with little hearts on them.  Some
of the hearts are drawn as though
they’re bordered by lace, some
not.  You can see that the child’s
right foot, as it protrudes
from her pajamas, is swollen
beyond recognition.  The mother,
who appears uninjured, looks down tenderly
at her daughter’s face, but the daughter
stares only straight ahead,
as though she sees nothing
at all, as though
what she sees is death. As though her eyes
have been blinded by fear or shrapnel.
She grasps her mother’s headscarf
with one hand, the hand
that may be holding on 
to the last shards of her life. 
There was a girl
who told silly stories to her mother
about her friends, her teachers.
There was a girl who asked
for heart pajamas, and her mother
found them, gave them to her
wrapped in colored paper.
How long ago was that?
How have they arrived here
on the bloodstained floor
of this hospital, how
can there be nothing but blankness
where this child is looking?

Day 462

A father tosses his child in the air.
He hasn’t seen him for weeks
but now they are together,
and the baby — maybe six
months old? — is chubby, healthy.
The father tosses him.
The baby giggles, smiles
at his father, and the father
laughs.  Up, up in the air!
That’s where death
comes from — the drones,
the warplanes —
But look, Death!  Here
is my strong young son!
You cannot have him,
Death!  You cannot take him
from me!  I will taunt you,
Death, with his bright
eyes, his vibrant skin!
Up, up I will toss him
but I will catch him each time
again in my arms. 
He is not yours.

Day 461

(for Dr Abu Safiya)

They took him into their tank,
stripped him naked, beat him,
taunted him, screamed obscenities
at him.  Did they dishonor
his child, whom they had already
murdered?  Did they dishonor
his work?  Five of his colleagues
they killed in front of him:
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Doctors, nurses he had worked with
for months. Years.  Did they 
force him to watch?  Did they
taunt his friends as they were shooting?
They kicked him, beat him 
with cables, shouted at him
that he was no doctor
practicing medicine, no pediatrician,
but a militant, hider of militants.
Did they keep torturing him?  Are they
feeding him?  Are they trying
to strip him of more than his white
coat, his knowledge, his care
for his patients?  

Day 460

The twelve year old boy 
goes to find water
to bring home to his family.
He is somehow still strong,
still able to walk on two legs.
Still able to carry water
with two hands.  He walks
past the rubble of his school,
past what were houses, a hospital.
The building where his best friend lived:
fallen, everyone who lived there
dead.  His friend, who,
on the last afternoon of his life,
challenged him to a race
and won.  Now I have to run
as fast as both of us combined,
run for both of us,
he thinks, and picks up
his pace, sprints
to where he’ll find water
to fill the jugs he’s holding,
carry them safely back, running
despite the water’s weight,
despite the road littered with ruins,
the drones overhead,
the snipers’ bullets.

Day 459

Each time her family has been displaced
the child brings her book
with her, the one book
she ran out of the house with
when the house was about
to be bombed.  It’s only because
it was what she happened
to be reading just then.  It wasn’t
her favorite book, not even
a very memorable book;  but now
she has read it over and over,
each time discovering
something new.  The book
has become like a trusted
friend:  she knows
exactly what it will bring her.
A story about a family
that travels a long way:  children
who play, who work
together, who have secrets
and jealousies.  Who stay alive.
Each time she goes back
into the book, she retrieves
a life.  Once she was able
to imagine a life like that,
a family like that, a trip
across an open land like that.
She returns to the book
as though it were a sheltering place.
As though it could take her in.

Day 458

(a report shows that 96% of children in Gaza think their death is imminent)

The child tells his older brother
he is sure he will die.
His brother looks at him.
They are twelve and eight.
Their father was killed a year ago.
Four siblings killed in a strike last month.
Their mother is alive, the baby alive,
but it’s cold and they’re hungry
and barefoot and they have
no winter jackets. If I can find you
a jacket, the older boy
asks, do you think you can stay alive?
The younger one is silent.  If I can
find you a jacket and a pair
of shoes?  Silence.  The younger boy
looks at the ground.  The air is filled
with the stench of death and sewage.
A jacket and a pair of shoes
and a bowl of soup?  the older
boy goes on, and at this
the younger one looks up
at his brother.  Lentil soup?
he asks, with bread? and his brother
nods.  And the younger one
says, his voice
weak with hunger,
tiredness, defeat, Yes, ok.

Day 457

Orders come that the hospital
must be evacuated, despite
the doctors telling them
it’s impossible:  too many patients,
illness and injuries too severe.
The old man gets help
rising from his bed.  Weeks
since he tried to walk.  Slowly
he detaches the iv’s:  fluids,
antibiotics, other medicines
he doesn’t know the use for.
Hands shaking, he moves
through the corridors.  Everyone
broken, stumbling, using the walls
to steady themselves.  He joins
the hobbled procession
out of the inferno the hospital
is already becoming.  Where they are
supposed to be going is far,
farther than the old man
has walked in years.  He takes the arm
of a younger man.  They walk
together.  Where they are going
is only another stopping place,
he thinks, and remembers a rock
he stood on once, years before
in another place,
in a rushing river, attempting to reach
the far riverbank, deafening water
crashing around him, relentless current
threatening to overcome him,
carry him away.