Day 476/Ceasefire Day 6

Children cheer as the trucks
roll in.  Even Nutella
is being distributed!
At the far end of the road,
a boy who could be ten, eleven,
stands watching the others,
tears running down his face.
His best friend is not
here, was killed just days
before the ceasefire.  The boy
remembers how they both loved Nutella,
would spread thick swathes 
of it on thick slices of bread
in the years they would walk
home together from school.
Now it will never taste
the same, he thinks.
How is it I’m crying
about Nutella, he goes on,
when so much else
has been ruined?  Only a week
before, when the ceasefire
had been announced but bombs
were falling even more brutally,
he’d sat on a slab of concrete
with his friend, naming the things
they missed that perhaps 
they might have again.  Nutella,
his friend had called out, laughing,
knowing that what was gone
forever — his house, his cousins,
his mother — would not be counted.