I write the number on paper
and I can’t believe my eyes.
It looks so small.
This whole notebook isn’t big enough
to hold the names behind those numbers
much less the faces
or the hearts.
How many tears have we cried
for those tiny faces
with their hunger wrapped skin-tight
around their miniature skeletons?
How many drops of sympathy
have rolled down my own cheek?
One, or two, or three?
How quickly did they dry?
Maybe if we took all of our tears
and put them in water bottles
the children of Iraq
would have clean water to drink.
For a day, anyway.
Or maybe if we’d opened up
the floodgates behind our eyes
a long time ago
their throats wouldn’t be dry.
You tell me that Saddam is the one
holding the key to their survival.
Who locked them in a coffin to begin with?
You tell me that Saddam is dangerous.
How would you feel
if someone took away your baby’s food
because they hated Bill Clinton?
I know that I’m supposed to be writing
about some pretty woman’s face
or the sunset I saw today
on the way to the coffeehouse.
I could write about those things
if I wanted to.
Yesterday I saw a smile as sweet as a songbird
and today’s colorful clouds loomed overhead
like a field of speckled blue tulips
all of them blooming into fiery roses
and closing into velvet violets.
But when I sit at this table to write
I try to find the biggest thing inside of me
and fit it onto the tip of my pen.
So there it is.
600,000.
But if I end with that number
all you’ll see are a bunch of zeroes.
These children aren’t zeroes.
Each second of this poem is a breath
the last breath drawn by a bony chest.
If you lean in close
you can hear the breath whisper out of the lungs
slide across trembling lips
and scatter into the night.
If you don’t lean in close enough
to pick up the pieces of this death whisper
all that’s left behind is the motionless body of a child
and the next one whose breath is fading.