Day 201

I am thinking now about the child
delivered from her mother
a moment after her mother’s death.
The mother sitting in her front room,
reading, perhaps, to her three year old, 
her husband sitting in another place
in the same room:  and then the missile,
the doctors frantically taking
the thirty-week infant from the still
body of her mother.  Never to know
the source of that voice. Never
to have that sister, that father.
The child, born of bomb and metal,
panic and the necessity of hope.