Day 325

Save what can be saved.
A girl searches through the rubble of her house
to find the necklace her grandmother gave her.
Unfathomably, she finds it.  Her grandmother —
killed in a bombing — had read to her, sung
to her, cared for her after her mother
was killed in an earlier bombing.
Save what can be saved.  It’s
a simple necklace, a glass stone
on a silver chain; but the stone
is the color of the sea, the color
of the girl’s eyes and the grandmother’s
eyes, and the girl had worn it
every day, unclasped it carefully
every night so the stone
wouldn’t be lost.  And now her grandmother
is lost, and her brothers, her father.
And what she has left 
is this necklace, which she holds
this minute in her hand, stares
at it, sees the sea and her grandmother
and some survived piece of herself
in the glass stone, and slowly,
slowly amid the rubble of what
had been her life she puts her hands
behind her neck, opens the clasp.