Day 529

(from a photograph and a story by Rasha Abou Jalal on Dropsite, after Israel shattered the ceasefire)

The eight year old girl Siwar
sits in a faded armchair
that survived months of bombardment
outside what must have been her home.
Gaza City.  Ruins behind her. She wears
a red and brown sweater, jeans,
stained white running shoes with pink laces.
Siwar has long fingers, graceful hands,
a soft smile.  Her brown hair is thin, likely
from malnutrition after months 
of starvation.  Maybe her family
had taken refuge in the south, walked back
to their home after the Ceasefire?  This night,
in the middle of the night, the bombing resumed.
The sky filled with planes, the night
filled with chaos.  Noise.  This morning
Siwar is dead, who yesterday
played outside her house.  Dead
with eleven members of her family.  Dead
with her pink shoelaces, her red
and brown sweater, her long fingers
that might have played some instrument,
that might have held a pen, a paintbrush,
that might have grasped the limb of a tree
she might have climbed to look out
on the world, the city beyond her, the sea.