Day 476/Ceasefire Day 6

Children cheer as the trucks
roll in.  Even Nutella
is being distributed!
At the far end of the road,
a boy who could be ten, eleven,
stands watching the others,
tears running down his face.
His best friend is not
here, was killed just days
before the ceasefire.  The boy
remembers how they both loved Nutella,
would spread thick swathes 
of it on thick slices of bread
in the years they would walk
home together from school.
Now it will never taste
the same, he thinks.
How is it I’m crying
about Nutella, he goes on,
when so much else
has been ruined?  Only a week
before, when the ceasefire
had been announced but bombs
were falling even more brutally,
he’d sat on a slab of concrete
with his friend, naming the things
they missed that perhaps 
they might have again.  Nutella,
his friend had called out, laughing,
knowing that what was gone
forever — his house, his cousins,
his mother — would not be counted.

Day 475/Ceasefire Day 5

You want to rejoice
that the sky is not filled
with warplanes, the trucks
have been allowed in, carrying
food, medicine.  That the children
can play outdoors.  You want
to rejoice, to run shouting and singing
through the streets – but the streets
you find when you return
to the city you lived in all your life
have been bombed to gravel,
are nothing you know.  You see someone
crouched over rubble, realize
it’s your neighbor.  You walk
toward each other like two ghosts
meeting in an afterworld 
they’d never imagined.  It’s good,
you say to him; and he smiles
at you, answers, Yes, it’s good.
Beneath you, where once
there were flourishing gardens,
the souls of your lost ones
stir, turn, then rest
more deeply, knowing at last
that you have come back.

Day 474/Ceasefire Day 4

You come home
to find bodies
under the rubble.  So much
has been eroded.  So much
detroyed.  What remains
is bone.  Hair gone, eyes
gone, lips gone.  Soft belly,
warm flesh.  You see half
of a silver ring.  A heel
of a shoe.  What
was a life is reduced
to minerals.  You come home
hoping to find a remnant,
a memory.  A cup handle?
A clock?  Instead
you dig out the bodies
of those you loved,
like the long decayed trunks
of fallen trees.  Like skeletons 
of fish the tide unburies
as it recedes.

Day 473/Ceasefire Day 3

A boy on his donkey
is shot by a sniper.  Killed.
A man runs to retrieve his body
and is killed as well.  It’s the third day
of the ceasefire but the soldiers
don’t want to stop.  Their habit
is killing, what they know
is to fix a target in their sight,
point, fire.  The boy
had been happy:  he’d had enough food
for the first time in months.  He’d fed
his donkey.  He’d been thinking
how it would be 
to go back to school, to look
for his friends, see who
was still living.  The boy
had survived this long
when the sniper found him.
The sniper was bored: a long
afternoon, not much action.
It was the third day
of what they were still calling
a ceasefire.  Why now? Why
this child?

Day 472/Ceasefire Day 2

Give me your hand, little sister.
We fled our home when you
were too young to remember.
What you know of this world
is the constant noise of bombings,
the pitch of drones, the stench
of blood, shit, corpses.  Give me
your hand.  I will show you —
now that you’re old enough
to walk — where we could take in
the fragrance of jasmine. The herbs
we planted: basil, sage.  I’ll show you
where flowers grew that attracted bees:
the sound you could have heard
though this first year of your life
was their humming and the flutter
of birds’ wings over the blossoms.
I’ll walk you to where
the lemon trees stood, show you
the place our father built a bench
where we sat in the shade on summer
afternoons.  Our house was there,
where I’m pointing.  I could tell you
what happened in every room
all my sixteen years: friends
who came, cousins
you’ll never know.  Here,
over these gray stones, is the way
I ran, carrying you.  Here’s
where our father was shot and killed.
Here is where you started to cry
from the noise and the smoke, and where
I took a path that was hidden and promised
to hold you until we were safe.  (Were we
ever safe?)  Here, little sister, is what
we’ve returned to. Here is where,
amid this wreckage and dust, we begin again.

Day 471/Ceasefire Day 1

The children are holding hands
and dancing, shouting.  Everyone
is outside:  no matter
the winter cold!  Some drones are still
crossing the sky, but the ceasefire
has happened!  It happened!
The girl goes back to where
her tent was; her brothers
are dismantling it, ripping
the flimsy nylon panels
that didn’t keep out
the rain, playing
tug of war with the shreds.
No use for them now!  We’re
going home!  She stands,
watching them. She is thinking
now about their mother,
who went out looking for food
one morning and never
came back.  She is thinking
about the garden they had
in the north, and how their mother
would have wanted to look
for it, see if anything green
could be peering out
from under the rubble,
and how she would have
tended it, nurtured it.  The girl
picks up a stone from the dusty ground
near where their tent had been,
puts it in her pocket.  This
is for my mother, she
thinks.  This is how
I will carry her home from this place,
lay her there where our garden was.

Day 470

He stopped along the way
because he saw a dog
who was injured, bleeding.
His own leg was wrapped
in gauze, a wound sustained
maybe a week before; and he bent,
unwound the end of the gauze
from his leg, bit it off,
wrapped it around the dog’s
leg.  The dog followed him:
quiet, limping.  The gauze
turned red with the dog’s
blood as the part still wrapped
around the man’s leg was red
with his blood.  So they walked,
a man whose family
had been killed, a dog
who maybe had belonged to someone,
who appeared out of nowhere,
who had probably been surviving
on rotting flesh.  So they walked
without food, without water,
until they came to a place
where the man sat down
on a pile of rubble
and the dog lay down
beside him.  Everything there
was dust. Everything there
had been flattened.  Maybe
they promised each other
something in that moment? Because those
who saw them walking together
wherever they were going afterward
said they never left
each other’s side.

Day 469

They are preparing to go back 
to their home in the north, this mother
and her two remaining children.
How long will it take them
to get there, just miles
away?  And what
will they see as they go?
Neighborhoods bulldozed
to nothing.  Rock and sand.
Raw sewage running in streets
that are barely streets anymore,
bodies still decomposing.
And their home?  The mother
knows it’s only rubble
under which her husband
lies buried, her two
older children. Yet
when these little ones
hear they’ll be allowed
to go home, they shriek
with happiness.  Are they young enough
to believe they’ll see their father again,
their two older brothers?
Do they think home
will be what it was before:
their toys in place, friends
playing ball next door?  She
doesn’t tell them.  Silently
she folds their few little things.
Maybe the sky will be 
what it was, she thinks:
the same hills in the distance,
same birds overhead? 

Day 468

The few things you still have, 
put them in this bag:  a notebook,
two pens, a needle you found
in a pile of rubble, catching the sun
one day.  Some thread unraveled
from a piece of someone’s shirt
you saw in another pile of lives
that had been destroyed.  A jacket
that belonged to a child:  how old
could she have been?  Three?
Four?  Little butterflies
on the front of it, a pink zipper.
A hood lined with nylon fleece.
How did it survive whole
when the child who wasn’t
wearing it exploded in fragments?
Too small for your child, but maybe
one day you’ll give birth
to another.  Take it
with you?  Take it
where?  Into some future
you can’t imagine but want
to believe in? 

Day 467

What use is a ceasefire, the girl
says to her brother, who isn’t
listening, when our parents
are dead, our sisters, the baby
who breathed two weeks and was
gone?  What use their telling us
we can go home, when there’s no
home anywhere?  Yet
children are linking arms, laughing
as they run down the ruined
streets. People are blasting music
from phones, dancing
over the rubble.  The girl
stands like a statue
outside her tent, shivers
a little from the cold.  It’s night.
Everyone’s awake.  Planes
are still crossing the sky.
She sees two girls she knows
racing past her, singing
some song she remembers
from before.  Before….
One of them waves to her
to come join them.  She takes
her brother’s cold small hand,
calls out to them — they’re far
ahead of her now — Wait! Wait for us!
Runs to catch up.