Day 266

(from a photograph)

A father is holding his sick child
She’s being taken across the border
for treatments, one of a few
children allowed.
The child — maybe four? — is thin,
pale.  We are not told
what illness she has, only
that she will be given medicine
and that her father cannot
go with her.  What kind of medicine
to take her away from him?  And where
is her mother?  And what will comfort her
through long hospital nights, tubes
in her arms, her stomach?  
In a moment the nurses
will take her. Look at her eyes
now:  blank, as though she sees
past her father to a world of dust
where it may not seem there is
medicine to heal their pain.