Day 534

The girl was always afraid
that her brother, sick from birth
with a heart defect,
would soon die.  Would die
before he had a chance
to work, study, be a father.
Never did she imagine that she
would be chosen by death
before him.  Never
did she imagine
the sniper’s bullet, the tent
shot through with holes, the long
night of explosions and screams.
Then she was dead, and her brother
weak, but still living, thinking
the one consolation 
was that his sister never  
had to grieve him. Then he too
stopped breathing, though quietly,
as though he’d slipped through
when the door was only
slightly ajar — almost unnoticed? —
to be near his sister again, from whom,
in this life, he’d been inseparable.