Fady Joudah

You were murdered.

to those who will develop kidney stones and liver failure from unclean water, to diarrhea, cold, and flu, to those who are maimed and will search for their missing limbs underground, across borders, and won't find their extremities after they find them, to those whose cherubic hearts couldn't handle the shock, and to those whose nicotine hearts blocked the flow, you too were killed.

To those who were killed because they refused to leave their homes to live in tents.

To those who were killed on their way to the tents.

To those who were killed in their tents with the cats they sheltered.

To those who were killed in UN shelters and in schools.

To those who were killed because they were medics, nurses, doctors, teachers, coders and decoders, and the last honest journalists.

to those who thought their biggest fear was to outlive their children, to those who are free of the fear of death because tyranny spoke its final answer and it was total, to those in a concentration camp the size of a metropolis, the only life they knew, to Jerusalem and Jenin,

to Jenin and Jerusalem, to the children who played in the craters the bombs made if the sand was right.

The bodies we count are not the bodies we retrieve from the river to the sea, and the bodies we retrieve are not always identifiable.

to those who guard their dead from the starving dogs of war who are different from the dogs of war that starved them, to those who cannot guard the corpses from rats, to those who rummage through the rubble for clothes, gloves, forks, plates, soap,

Toothpaste and wooden furniture to burn for cooking and to keep warm.

They will not accept your apology after the genocide, O theology of empire.

To diapers, scissors, sanitary pads, to shoes, prenatal care, and onesies.

to beards and headscarves, to erased archives that housed centuries, to pulverized libraries, to St.

Perferius and the Omari Mosque, and to those who hold vigils day and night for a hand sticking out of a crack in the wreckage.

Wave to us, can you wave to us, they say, and she does, and it buoys them from the river to the sea.

to those who never heard her voice and loved her in silence, to those who cried over the animals they left behind, some cows, some goats, many chickens and ducks, and to the ducks and chickens that starving dogs did not spare, to the roosters crowing over the rhythmic blasts, to starlings, sparrows, seabirds, sardine and mullet, to mules and donkeys dying of a thousand cuts,

Who's whispering in your ears?

To the horses led from stable rubble to rubble stable.