Day 314

I am listening for what you have to tell me.
Refaat, I am one of many
trying to tell the rest of your story.
Of all those killed in the massacre, not a single one
identifiable.  Bodies torn, shattered.
Must I say that the fields
of devastation lie endlessly
before us?  The already-starving step over
pieces of corpses, searching
for anything: was this my son,
my wife, my mother?  This hand, do I
know it, shredded as it is?
What will I bury?  I am thinking now
of Akhmatova: on the line 
outside the Leningrad Prison, asked
by a woman whose lips
were blue with cold, “Could one
ever describe this?”
And the poet,
anguished as she was, said to her “I can.”
And wrote — over
the next thirty years —
her great poem, her Requiem.
No foreign sky protected me
No stranger’s wing shielded my face…
Is that what I’m writing? I ask you.
A requiem?