Day 295

(for Aseel)

What will you do, Nora asks you,
when this is over?  You say
you’ll return to your home,
your street.  You’ll clean up
the rubble.  You’ll do it
with friends, neighbors.
I can picture you now:  mops, tools
in everyone’s hands.  Everyone chatting,
singing.  The kids with music
blasting from their phones, dancing.
I can see someone bringing platters
of food, pitchers of water.  I can see
the wall of the first house standing.
Then the second.  Then the whole street
of houses, the children — the ones
too young even to remember what
it was like before — chasing each other
up the new stairs, calling to their parents
from the open windows. I can hear the parents
talking quietly to each other, sitting outdoors
in the still night after the children
have gone to bed.  I can see one woman —
you? — digging in fresh soil under the moon, alone,
planting something green and young.
Naming, as you place it tenderly
in the ground, those you have lost.  Your
cousins. Refaat. Others. Whispering
See, we are here.  We have come through.