Day 486/Ceasefire Day 16

Say they were baking bread.  They
were sitting in the front room
drinking coffee, talking
about nothing important.  The fragrance
of rising bread pervading
the house.   Say the children
were playing some game, running
from one room to the next,
hiding, squealing.  Say it was just
a day, a day folded in among others.
Nothing remarkable.  Clear sky.
No drones, no warplanes.  Say
there had never been bombings.
Say everyone in the family
was alive, not thinking
of wounds, amputations,
rank odors of sewage.  Say
there had always been food.
Say the water was clean.  Say
they awakened, ate, worked.
Say the children came home
and told what they’d learned.
Say there was never this destruction,
these ravaged buildings, concrete
and stones, miles of broken walls.
Say the hospitals were standing.
classes being taught at the universities.
Say there was never the sound of explosions, 
never these bones lying under the ground.  

Day 485/Ceasefire Day 15

Later you will tell the children
who’ll be born when these atrocities
have ended once and forever, whose
lives will have begun with the liberation —
later you will tell them, stroking
their small, safe heads, looking
into their unclouded eyes, that there were those
who walked for miles to reach this place,
carrying the few belongings they had,
carrying their children, their parents,
on their backs.  Later you will tell them,
because it will be important that they know,
there were families who slept in graveyards,
who felt they were as dead as those
who slept under the ground.  You will tell them
you knew a woman who buried the severed limbs
of her children when no whole body
was found;  a child whose parents
were killed before he had breathed
one single day; a man who was imprisoned
in another country before he’d even told
people there the stories of that time.  They will question
you, puzzled, incredulous.  You will tell them
this is enough for now; but we must not forget.
Then they will race each other from the house,
through the orchard, their bare small feet
wet from sweet morning grass,
and look out over fields abundant with what
you will have planted in soil
soaked with blood, nourished by the bones of the martyred. 

Day 484/Ceasefire Day 14

Even the donkey is dead,
killed in a shelling.  Patient,
stalwart donkey
who pulled the cart
loaded with all their things, with
other things too:  what food there was,
carried in the cart to those
too weak or wounded
to get it themselves.  Uncomplaining
donkey, pulling the cart
day and night, in heat, 
freezing rain. Tell me: why
should even this animal
have been murdered?  He
was the boy’s friend 
after other friends
were killed.  He was there
waiting each morning,
humble, willing.  Lowering his head
to let the boy harness him.  Hungry
like the boy.  Thirsty
like the boy.  Like
the boy, in pain.

Day 483/Ceasefire Day 13

She dreams her mother is in the room.
She dreams there’s a room.
She dreams her right hand
is attached to her wrist.
She dreams she’s able to write a letter.
She dreams she’s grown skilled
at using her left hand.  She dreams
her right hand has become a flag,
a banner, a wide-winged bird
in a clear sky. A sky
that is free.  She dreams that 
at the same time it’s her hand.  
With her right hand she draws a house
in the sky.  A room.  Her mother.
She has been walking for so long,
her father, her brothers beside her.
She dreams she has never
lost her hand, that
they’ve come back 
to a clear sky, where everything is alive.
Where her hand is alive.
Where her mother becomes 
a wide-winged bird, who
shields them.  Covers them.

Day 482/Ceasefire Day 12

Fragments of lives —
shattered, unrecognizable.
The rubble ground to nothing, bulldozed.
Impossible to tell there was even
a house here, a block of houses.
The child has walked his small dog
all the way from the south, 
a rope for a leash.  He arrives at last
with his father at the place
his father thinks was home.
The dog sniffs what seems like
nothing but broken stones. 
Sniffs, stops.  Is this the place?
Was this where the garden was?
Was this where the wall was
with windows that looked out
on the rows of vegetables?   
The dog sniffs and sniffs.  The boy
stands, watching her.  The father,
too, watches the dog, wonders
what she has found.  Sunlight
falls on his shoulder.  He wipes
his eyes, remembering.

Day 481/Ceasefire Day 11

(for A.)

It was a dream, a wish to get back
to the north
But finally after 15 months, we are
back the young man
writes to me, and All my family
members are ok
I moved from sleeping in streets
to be under a roof
It’s like moving from hell to heaven
We must remember
there are stories like this one.
The young man buried
for three days under the rubble
with his wife, their unborn baby
dead, goes back to his family home
(his own place destroyed)
after fifteen months
and finds everyone there, waiting.
The bed of his childhood waiting.
Food waiting, warmth. We must remember
that in the midst of loss (his friend
martyred days before
the cease fire, the child
in the womb for eight months — who
would he have been?) there is also joy.
Welcoming.  Celebration.
That sadism, brutality, destruction
cannot claim their victory.
That among the crushed streets
the spirit survives, not crushed.

Day 480/Ceasefire Day 10

They cried every night, these two brothers,
for months:  cried for their cousins,
their friends, their school,
their house.  But today
they are walking, part of the endless 
procession home!  Today
they have eaten, today
they are looking ahead,
behind, all around, and what they see
is the ocean of people on their way
back north.  Who has given them
these drums?  Did they carry them
with them through all
the displacements?  The drums
have survived the bombings,
the fires, the snipers’ bullets.
Like these boys, they are whole,
strong.  The brothers stand,
beating their drums, singing
in their sweet unbroken voices
as the people walk by: elderly fathers
carried on the shoulders
of their sons, a woman being pushed
in a makeshift wheelchair, weeping.
cheering. The boys beat out
their song: Today
is the first day of the revolution!
The first day of the new moment
we will rebuild!  Today
is the first day of our freedom!

Day 479/Ceasefire Day 9

They are walking north, toward
what had been their lives.
An endless line of people: parents
carrying children, children
carrying younger children, old
people walking slowly, some
being pushed in wagons,
infants on their fathers’ backs.
They are walking north, knowing
that when they arrive 
what they’ll find
is not what they remember,
knowing that the anguished work
of digging will perhaps yield
the bones, the skulls
of those who were martyred,
whose hands they can still feel
touching their hands, whose laughter
has been absorbed by the dust.  They
are walking north.  Some are singing.
Some have tears running down their faces.
One says, It’s like being able to return
to the villages of our grandparents.
Another says, sobbing, If only
my grandfather had lived
to see this day. A boy says, Tomorrow
we will begin to rebuild. A woman
keeps thinking she sees
her children, though she knows
their small bodies have decomposed
under the rubble.  They are with me,
she thinks to herself.  I am
bringing them home.

Day 478/Ceasefire Day 8

Clothing is strewn on the hard ground
in front of where the hospital stood:
scrubs, hospital gowns,
jeans, t-shirts, jackets visitors wore
and people sheltering.  This is no
art exhibit but the remnants
of lives, signifiers of an hour
when people were driven
from their beds, iv’s ripped out, those
too weak or too disabled to walk
carried by others.  Stripped, beaten,
nurses and doctors along with their patients,
elderly ones, young amputees.  Here
are their last possessions.  Here
are the markers of their time
inside the ruined walls:  a shirt
slipped over someone’s head
in the chilly morning.  A white coat
worn in the last examination
all someone’s years of training
led up to: Vigilant ear
assessing the level
of congestion.  The final listen   
to the final heartbeat.  

Day 477/Ceasefire Day 7

You wanted to go back
to what it was:  your room
with its colored curtains, your bookshelf,
your desk with the papers you meant
to set in order. Your father
pruning the trees in the last light
of day.  Your mother
walking in from work,
having stopped on the way
for greens, lentils, flour.
Your brothers with their laptop
streaming sports, your little sister
with her kitten and her wild hair.
You wanted to go back
and find everyone
as you’d left them, as though
it were simply the following day,
as though the genocide
hadn’t happened, had been
only a nightmare, and you could 
find them at home again, tell your brothers
to lower the volume, help
your mother put away the groceries,
call your father inside before dinner
was ready, feed
the kitten, take a soft brush
to your sister’s hair
as you’d done the evening before
and the evening before that.