Day 216

A child who is thin and cannot breathe.
A child who has lost both his legs.
A child whose family died but she is alive.
I am making a catalogue of broken children.
I am thinking of the boy I knew, who laid dolls
one beside another in my sand tray, covered them
with my shawl. The dolls were dead.
He did not talk about his missing leg.
He spoke of his infant sister, his grandmother.
It was spring; we went outside, into the garden.
We smelled the purple hyacinths. It was hard for him to bend
with his prosthetic leg; he hadn’t learned yet.
More purple than any flower he had ever seen.
He wanted to know the names of all the flowers.
I asked what his sisters’ names had been.