Day 492/Ceasefire Day 22

(for Asem Alnabih and Refaat Alareer)

What greater act of friendship
than to search for the body
of your friend for days,
going from one 
destroyed home to another,
asking this person, that person,
and at last finding the makeshift grave
in someone’s destroyed
yard, a piece of paper
on a stick, the handwritten
(with a blue Expo marker?) name
of your friend and the day he was murdered?
What greater love
than to walk, carrying his body
and the bodies of those
who were killed with him
to the graveyard in the neighborhood
he lived in from childhood, the place
he loved best?  Imagine that procession,
four bodies in a single bag, other bodies
in other bags, your friend’s body
not even whole.  Bodies recognized
from the clothes they were wearing,
since the flesh, the features, had decomposed.
What greater tribute 
than that walk,
finally to lay your friend to rest
in a known place, a place
he would have asked for?