by Jean Mikhail
*
I have witnessed little animals, their death throes at my doorstep, ones killed or maimed by my cat, Phoebe, and from time to time, I have nearly stepped on some small dead something, and I’d love to catch her before the killing act, to turn back time, and gently place the baby rabbit back in its burrow, or set the fledgling robin on a branch, safely, but instead, I have tossed the carcass in the trash or pitched the body into the woods, a safe distance away, and I have shifted my focus, turned my eyes from their bloody mouths, lifted my shoe to float over them, like a cloud crosses the convex eyes of a child of Gaza, lying dead, and I saw him in, of all places, a Facebook video while scrolling through all the other videos of surfers surfing, of people giving cooking lessons, and the bombing of this building, the concrete caving into a boy’s chest, he will never crack a smile, or break into laughter, ever again, he was made to be a martyr, in his mother’s eyes, a martyr, his brown eyes softening into cloud wisps, into blue sky reflection, and he and other children throughout history, the children of the Holocaust, of Syria, and those others murdered for no reason, no fault of their own, don’t even have a doorstep tombstone, or a proper burial, or a bell ringing like a doorbell, no one will answer the question why their deaths don’t matter, or how can this be happening, because let’s face it, we’d never get anything done if we solely focused on the world’s horrors, we’d never even get our shopping done, or have the strength to lift our heavy brown paper sacks to the car because everything would feel so burdensome, heavy as a body, as concrete collapsing into the child counted among the dead, a number, a child cocooned in a burial cloth, and the world tilts on its heavier side, and we are on the lighter side giving nothing but a thumbs up for dying children, and all we can do is hope for better endings, for a ceasefire and for peace, I can no longer watch a mother grieve, yet can’t look away from her, either, as she performs the ungodly task of collecting her child’s blown off ears and fingers, wiping tears on her hijab because what else does she have but a sheer will to survive and head covering, and how else can she know her child’s hand from any other child’s hand, like my own children's hands, how would I recognize them, whose hand would I hold, whose fingers thrown into the air, asking which almighty to help them.
*
Jean Mikhail lives in Athens, Ohio with her husband, who is Egyptian. Two of her children are Guatemalan adoptees. She has published in The Appalachian Review, Sheila Na Gig Online, Pudding Magazine, and other journals and anthologies.
Wrenching poem. Words for something more insidious, darker, more evil than words can express. Thank you