Day 186

Now it is spring.  We have passed Autumn, Winter.
Always the sky is the same gray.  Bombs and the debris of bombs.
The air filled with the smell of garbage, rotting corpses.
Is this the way it will always be? the child asks
who cannot remember what it was like 
before.  His sister is holding his hand,
watching a starving dog pick at another dog’s body.
If I die first you can eat me, she wants to say
to her brother.  Instead she tightens her hand 
around his, as though her grip were enough
to keep him alive.