Day 294

You send your child to the market
because he’s hungry
and you have no food for him.
Later you hear an explosion:
the market has been bombed.
You find him, after a grueling search,
at the field hospital:
alive, though he will
lose a leg.  You send your child
anywhere, knowing
he may come home
or not.  Knowing
every goodbye is a last goodbye.
And if you’d had food.  And if
you lived where there was a kitchen.
And if you could tell him 
when this will end, when
his hunger will be sated, when
what’s left of his leg
after the surgery
will stop hurting.  When
there will be medicine
to stop the pain. And if
this were an ordinary time
and you could be angry with him
for staying away too long, for
stopping to have a long game of catch
with friends, for going back
to the market and asking
for more because after
all that he was still
hungry….