Day 342

What did we do wrong, the boy
asks his mother?  Why are we here?
He is trying to understand the losses,
the bombings, the hunger.  How do we tell
the child that cruelty is random, 
that brutality cannot be understood,
that there is no reason?  So difficult,
when you offer him one spoonful
of rice and his sister, one; when
you bandage his bleeding hand
and his friend’s bleeding foot,
when you hold him all night
because he cannot stop crying.
What he has learned from you
is tenderness, fairness; how
talk to him now about hearts
where there is none?