Day 536

The starving body
first eats its own muscles.  Then
moves to the vital
organs:  heart.  Kidneys. Liver.
The brain starts lacking
what it needs
to think, even to feel.
Everything begins to slow:
this is why you can’t
stand, run — even
think of running! — out of the tent
when night falls
with its big explosions.
Your arms, your legs
start to ache relentlessly.
Your head aches, your stomach.
Ultimately the body
resigns itself, acquiesces, slips
without struggle
into death’s jaws.  Body
that should have carried its spirit
through years, through love
and work, through seasons,
weathers.  Body
that should have danced,
leapt fences, tossed
balls — instead
lies down.  Surrenders.

Day 535

The games will be played
that you couldn’t play, littlest
sister, shot in the back
by a sniper’s bullet.  The songs
will be sung that you
couldn’t sing, the dances
danced; the words
you were only beginning
to speak will be spoken,
now, by others.  Littlest sister,
with hands so small
they couldn’t hold
a shovel, a kettle, a pot.
Littlest sister, who wanted to learn
everything we knew:  we
will lay your tiny body
in the earth, cover it
with flowers and debris, 
with shards of bone, of
the city; with the smell
of jasmine and rot.  With everything
you knew, everything you
can take away from this life.
Our resolve, our resistance,
will be for you.  And at moments
we’ll be surprised by a slender weight
that stops for a moment
on our shoulders:
as though a butterfly
had landed there, or a small bird.

Day 534

The girl was always afraid
that her brother, sick from birth
with a heart defect,
would soon die.  Would die
before he had a chance
to work, study, be a father.
Never did she imagine that she
would be chosen by death
before him.  Never
did she imagine
the sniper’s bullet, the tent
shot through with holes, the long
night of explosions and screams.
Then she was dead, and her brother
weak, but still living, thinking
the one consolation 
was that his sister never  
had to grieve him. Then he too
stopped breathing, though quietly,
as though he’d slipped through
when the door was only
slightly ajar — almost unnoticed? —
to be near his sister again, from whom,
in this life, he’d been inseparable.

Day 533

In the dust, children are drawing.
They are drawing with sticks,
with their fingers.  One draws a house:
someone’s face in a window, a tall
stick figure outside, surrounded
by smaller ones.  A father
and his children?  Another child
draws two cats eating.  Another
is drawing a garden:  rows of flowers,
melons, squash.  Above it, a sun
whose rays stand out in all
directions:  shining.  Shining.
The children are drawing all afternoon.
The adults come and watch 
now and then, but don’t
say anything.  They know
the children are aware 
that — in a matter
of hours? — their drawings
will be erased
by rain, blown away
by wind, destroyed
by bombing.  They know
the children know this,
even as they trace their
careful, skillful lines
in the dust:  stopping,
looking, correcting. 

Day 532

No fresh food at the markets.  No pause
between bombs, no 
light.  No light!  A child
killed by a sniper, who made it alive
through sixteen months.  Her mother
tired, weak, doing what she can
to keep her other children
alive.  A can of tuna, a can
of peaches, which only a week ago
she could afford, so expensive
now.  Choose one.  Choose 
which child will get half
a can, which ones
get less.  All the fears
she let go for a moment
hammer at her in her sleep,
through the day.  And the daughter
who’s missing stands
in the empty space
she left, her eyes wide open,
asking why.  Why?

Day 531

Give me your hand.  We can still walk
together over the ruins.  The destruction
that paused for a moment has begun again. 
Walk with me under these skies, that were clear
and now are filled again with death.  Death
rattles its poison chant over our heads.
The walls we rebuilt are falling, graves
open their mouths to devour our children.
Walk with me. Spring taunts us
with its wildflowers:  blue and purple,
orange and white.  For now they drift
in the gentle air; tomorrow
their green and supple stems
will be soaked again in our blood.

Day 530

For a short while you returned.
Eight weeks!  It was like
the dream of return
your grandmother held
as long as she lived, until
the bomb came for her one night
in her bed.  For a short while 
you surveyed the jagged stones
that had been your house.
Held one, then another,
remembering rooms,
floors, walls of bookshelves.
For a short while
you held the dream
that return was possible.  Was
granted.  You piled
one stone on another,
imagined tables, chairs.  Long
afternoons by the window, watching
your children play
in the garden you’d plant again,
safe behind the fence you’d rebuild.
Now you’ve been told to leave
once more.  Now you turn, call
your children’s names.  Slip
one small stone into
your pocket.  Press it
into your hand. 

Day 529

(from a photograph and a story by Rasha Abou Jalal on Dropsite, after Israel shattered the ceasefire)

The eight year old girl Siwar
sits in a faded armchair
that survived months of bombardment
outside what must have been her home.
Gaza City.  Ruins behind her. She wears
a red and brown sweater, jeans,
stained white running shoes with pink laces.
Siwar has long fingers, graceful hands,
a soft smile.  Her brown hair is thin, likely
from malnutrition after months 
of starvation.  Maybe her family
had taken refuge in the south, walked back
to their home after the Ceasefire?  This night,
in the middle of the night, the bombing resumed.
The sky filled with planes, the night
filled with chaos.  Noise.  This morning
Siwar is dead, who yesterday
played outside her house.  Dead
with eleven members of her family.  Dead
with her pink shoelaces, her red
and brown sweater, her long fingers
that might have played some instrument,
that might have held a pen, a paintbrush,
that might have grasped the limb of a tree
she might have climbed to look out
on the world, the city beyond her, the sea.

Day 528/Ceasefire Day 58

And the cattle have also been killed.
Gentle cows who grazed in the fields.
Children who sat and milked them, 
their parents who taught them.
Others who led them up and down
from the pastures:  north pasture, south pasture,
morning, then evening. Light
changing, growing golden, purple,
as quietly they led the cows at the end
of day to barns they had built.  This
happened and happened. 
Slow cows, lowering their heads.  Their deep
sounds a lament.  The sweet
grass gone, the children gone, the parents
gone.  Cows who wasted and died
of starvation, for lack
of water. Cows who died in the bombings. Why,
tell me, would anyone want to murder a cow
except to deprive a farmer of his living?
Farmer who was murdered anyway.  Children
of the farmer, murdered anyway. The land
also murdered: what was grass,
blown to dust. Where barns stood:
broken stones. More stones.

Day 527/Ceasefire Day 57

Why would this man
not have a right
to rebuild his house?  The one
that stood before the bombing
had been built by him:  months
of setting one board
against another, wiring, laying
the pipes.  All his labor
destroyed in a single moment;
but he and his family escaped.
Survived!  Why would he be denied
materials now?  Why now?
By night he digs through the rubble,
scavenges, finds whatever 
he can redeem of the original
house:  a pipe here, a handful
of screws.  Who has the right
to deprive him of this, even to tell him
it’s futile, the bombs
will come again?  Will take down
the work of his determined hands.
Who will tell him this
as he hammers one wall to another,
imagines how they will live
there, how their days will unfold?