Day 506/Ceasefire Day 36

At twelve, she’s lost everything.
Father dead, mother dead, siblings.
Best friend dead.  Other friends. Teachers.
It’s cold and rainy and she has
just one shirt, one pair of jeans.
No jacket.  The shirt short-sleeved.
Has it been so long
since she’s spoken to anyone
that she doesn’t remember
how?  How
to tell a story?  Father dead.  Mother
dead.  Cold, she says. Hungry.  House
bombed.  Nothing, she says.
Vast uncharted spaces in her mind
between one memory and another.
Rubble spaces.  Dust spaces. Nothing,
she repeats, wanting
perhaps to be understood.
Nothing left?  Nothing
more to say? Nothing
to look for?  Nothing
to hope for?  Nothing
in her stomach, nothing
in her heart?

Day 505/Ceasefire Day 35

What do you tell the children
now that you’ve walked all the way back
to where you were when everything began
and there’s no home waiting for you,
not even the promised trailer, not even the tent
you left behind in the south?  Broken anyway,
you told them; for weeks, it let in the cold, the rain.
What do you tell them when they ask
for friends who played with them in the street
only a day before the bombing?  What do you say
when they ask for their school, their teachers?
Their questions are the edge of an abyss
you don’t want to look down at. They echo
for you through the night, stand waiting for you
when you open your eyes in the morning.
What can you tell the children,
who ask for the past, the future?
Around you the fragrance of wildflowers
competes with the stench of bodies 
rotting too far beneath the rubble
to dig out. Each body a cry.  A story.

Day 504/Ceasefire Day 34

Tomatoes, favas, white potatoes, kale.
Zucchini, red potatoes, chile peppers, avocados.
Bell peppers. Lettuces. How did they grow?
How were they protected? How
did they survive the fetid air, 
the dust, the smoke, the contamination?
How did they come to life
with no water, foul water, salt water?
And who tended them?  Who harvested them?
Now they’re displayed on stands
at a market the people have organized.
Now people survey them, take them
in their hands, hold them to their faces
so they can smell them, feel them
against their skin.  Beyond the market, 
ruins of the city:  but that’s not
|what they’re looking at now, the ones
who walk among these stands,
looking at vegetables, thinking
of how they’ll cook them,
eat them.  The grayness of bulldozed
lives, fallen buildings, crushed dreams
is near, but it is not everything:  everything
now includes these offerings of the earth
and of resistance. These ripened promises.

Day 503/Ceasefire Day 33

The child is sleeping.  Her mother
moves quietly around her.  Though the tent
is small, it holds everything
they have:  a few pairs of shoes,
two jackets, some cans of food.
The child, whose brother is playing
outside with a friend, sleeps deeply,
peacefully. The one arm she still has
is wrapped around a stuffed blue dog
that somehow, miraculously,
has survived bombings, displacements,
driving rain.  Her mother
straightens the light blanket, brushes
her daughter’s hair with her hand.
Maybe today she is in less pain.
Maybe today she has made a step
toward accepting the arm that is missing.
Maybe today, when she wakes
from her nap, the air will be filled
with the smell of flowers
beginning to blossom, the late afternoon
will be peaceful, her brother
will hold her one hand that is there,
will walk with her outside, will take her
to look for jasmine, cyclamen, poppies. 

Day 502/Ceasefire Day 32

The market is filled with people again.
Potatoes, zucchini, lettuce.  Just looking at them
fills you with happiness!  The skin of the apples
so shiny, the broccoli a deep blue-green.
Is it possible for a moment to forget
the long months of siege?  For a moment, yes.
You walk past the stands, the din of conversation
blurring your thoughts.  You say hello 
to this one, that.  You didn’t know anymore
who was alive, who still had their arms
and legs, who would return.  Your bag
fills with what you will bring
to your children, what you will cook
for them later — not yet in a kitchen, but
on a fire you’ll build
in front of your tent.  Flame the color
of the sun that will set 
unobscured by warplanes.  Your childrens’ faces
rapt, watching as heat softens the grains,
the vegetables.  Such contentment you feel at last 
to be able to feed them.

Day 501/Ceasefire Day 31

No one followed the boy
to the place where he hid.
No one saw him slip between blocks
of concrete, no one heard his steps
as he climbed to a place
where he couldn’t be seen
and then dropped down.  It was dark.
Darkness of midwinter night, darkness
of stones lying on stones, remnants
of buildings that had stood there,
darkness of months of death
and the stench of death, darkness
inside the boy, all around him.  No one
followed him to the place 
where he’d chosen to hide,
a place he had found, a place
that reminded him of a game
he’d played once
with friends, though he couldn’t remember
the game or when he’d played it
and with which friends.  Everything,
everyone, gone.  Gone.  Stench
of death there’s no hiding from, a place
dark and quiet enough to be refuge
from thoughts, nightmares, words.  Words?
No one followed the boy
but his brothers were calling him.
Where was he?  Where, he wondered,
was his voice?  Why
couldn’t he find his voice?
Had he died with everyone
who had died?  Darkness. Darkness.
A hand reaching down for him:
his older brother calling his name.
No one followed the boy
but his brothers knew somehow where
he had gone.  Reached down for him.
Dredged him up from his darkness. Carried him back.

Day 500/Ceasefire Day 30

The house was always filled
with the voices of children:
little ones shrieking as they chased
each other through the rooms, older ones
talking, arguing, kicking a ball
in the courtyard, their shouts
coming in through the open window.
Now there’s no window.  No house.
Now there are voices missing.
Now the little ones still alive
are older, subdued.  Now one
of the older girls stands
on a slab of concrete in the rain,
and when she's told to come
inside the tent they’ve pitched
over the rubble, she looks up,
looks away, can barely answer,
can barely string a few words
together.  She who loved to sing
doesn’t sing anymore.  She
who used to be told be quiet,
turn out the light, stop
keeping your sisters awake,
doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t want
to think of her sisters no
longer there:  the older one
with her tangled hair.  The younger one,
whose hand she held every night
as they fell asleep.

Day 499/Ceasefire Day 29

(for Abubaker)

He wanders the ruined land, one place
disturbingly like another:  no way
to orient, no landmarks, only the sun
in its consoling predictability, moving
across the sky, tracing east, west.
He is looking for what remains.  He
is looking for what he remembers.
At moments, a sign:  the shape
of a building surmised from the part
that still stands.  A tree that, unfathomably,
survives, its roots seeking nourishment
from far underground, where bombs
could not penetrate.  He wanders, 
looking for what was there, for what
will be there again.  Sometimes he thinks
he can see people walking, carrying
vegetables, bread.  Sometimes
he hears a lively conversation: students
talking about a book, a lecture
they’ve just heard by a loved professor.
He walks the ruined land
populating it with those
who were killed, vowing to them
that their voices, their dreams, will not be lost.

Day 498/Ceasefire Day 28

Our lives are not rubble.
Our lives are the tree-lined avenues
that were here before, and will be here again.
We will walk, we will sit in cafés
and remember how we rebuilt them.
We will find new books to replace
the ones that have gone to dust, new stories
to add to the old ones.  We will not forget:
we will weave the names of our dead
into our own names, into the names
of children yet to come.  We will take the rubble
in our hands, hold it tenderly, lovingly,
because it contains all the things
we have lost; and then use it
to build what we build anew.  
Our hands will be warmed by grief and memory.
Memory and grief and joy will be braided 
into the walls we make, the rugs
we will walk on, the curtains
we’ll part to look out on what
we will have created. 

Day 497/Ceasefire Day 27

In the night, her child
comes back to ask her questions.
She sleeps in a tent
on the rubble of her house.  Why?
the child asks.  Why was our house
taken down?  And what
do these stones mean?  She turns,
restless, listening to the rain
that pounds the tent.  Why
did you leave me
alone?  the child
asks her.  Did you have to run
so fast, you could not 
find me?  She wakes,
opens the flap of the tent.  Rain
wets her face more than the tears
already there.  She’s not
even asleep, but her child
is still asking his questions.
She wants to tell him
the whole story:  how
she tried to get to him
but the wall between them
had already collapsed.  How
she grabbed the hand 
of his sister, who
had been sitting beside her,
reading a book.  How they both
called his name, knowing
he was too small to run.
How is it we’re back here,
he asks her, and yet not
back?