For the children of Lebanon lost to war
The children were buried along with their names,
linked vowels and consonants curling up close
to the stiff small torsos laid out in a silent line,
a reminder despite death of who they still were.
The names tried to comfort the children, but they
too were terrified of the bombs that had wrested
the children’s souls from their bodies in a fireball
of anguish. They knew there was no protection
from the missiles that stole lives, ripping the language
of home from crushed stone houses and sheared-off
apartment buildings sliced open to air or flattened
in layers like card houses collapsed on themselves.
The names knew what they held, and who held them.
They had promised to accompany the children
through life and after, voicing their essence
and being, their singular beauty; affirming their legacy,
their family belonging. This was the only certainty
they could offer. But certainty is not safety, and there
was no escaping danger: not even in the grave
where there was nothing left to lose. The bombs
that killed the children savaged the cemeteries,
those homes of the dead, shattering headstones
with their loving inscriptions, gouging craters
deeper than graves into the desecrated earth.
The letters so carefully etched into stone flew
in bits to the air along with the bone fragments
blasted from earth that showered down in a ghastly
rain, settling like a shroud on the broken land,
broken syllables scattered, names reduced to a wail.
We link soul to body with names, celebrating birth,
anchoring the long, longing journey through life,
sealing the promise of remembrance after death.
Once the body is gone, names have at least a hope
of lingering. But where shall we find the names
of the smallest dead? The news hardly holds space
for adults, much less children, though there are occasional
mentions, names limp like newly-killed bodies stripped
of memory. Fatima Abdulla, age 9, her light eradicated
by an exploding pager that mangled her face, bloodying
her mother’s kitchen. Rimas, Taline, and Lianne Chour,
14, 12, 10, incinerated in their family car by an Israeli missile
that zeroed in on them as they fled, seeking safety,
a place to hide, another breath, a handful of hope.
And what of the hundreds more killed, names lost
to deepest absence, the children ignored by news
that does not recognize their deaths, their too-short lives?
I want to write letters to these children, follow them
beyond death, keep them alive even as the bombs
continue to fall. I want to tell them stories about the forever
they will always occupy in our hearts, the sunlight
that will never forget them. But I have no name
or address for their soul lights, those small sparks
ffluttering like birds above our sorrow, watching us.
I want to weave a cloth of gauze for the littlest dead
from the names their parents gave them at birth, the stories
and laughter that followed: a cloth sheer and delicate,
fragile enough to let light through, strong enough
to bear what cannot be held, what is torn to darkness;
to interlace their names into the haze of memory,
so that their faces gleam past death, shine as they did
when their mothers called them to lunch or homework
or a dear relative visiting, uttering the simple names
that held them safe in the weave of love, that tapestry
rich with the impossible daily broken promise of life.
Lisa Suhair Majaj