Day 490/Ceasefire Day 20

The family comes back to the place
where their house was.  They have survived
except for one: their father’s brother.
When the house was destroyed,
their uncle was killed.  The rest
fled south, managed somehow
to live.  Now they’ve come back,
though what they’ve come back to
is nothing they can live in.  They search
in the rubble for their uncle, for anything
they can find that was his.  Nothing.
They plant their tent over what was
their living room.  All day they clear
stones, fallen concrete.  At night they stand
together under the stars.  We
have survived, except
for one.  The littlest girl
thinks she sees her uncle in a shadow
the moon makes.  Her brother
says he thought he saw him earlier,
between parts of collapsed walls.  Their father
says he heard his brother’s voice
telling him to lift this slab, not that one.
Then he is here with us, the littlest one
says, and the night sky fills
for a moment with his face, his words.