She has a name, Israel -- followed by a reflection on its writing

(She has a name, Israel.

Is she lucky?)

The child captured

in a photograph . . .

("Life used to be normal. She would run and play,")

It's hard to see her . . .

the tiny figure towards the back.

They gaze up at the photograph(er).

The men look abject, and exhausted.

(She has a name, Israel)

The little girl, . . .is looking away.

Maybe she just doesn't want to look at the soldiers. . .

The military told the people to stop here.

Bomb-blasted buildings stretch. . . into the distance.

The little girl, . . .is looking away.

The child's. . . expression

poses so many questions.

A week of hundreds killed, . . .

thousands uprooted

She said her name slowly . . .

. . .The message on the phone read: "We have found her!"

She was watching a cartoon of animated chickens singing

(Over) the ominous whine of a drone overhead.

She said her name slowly . . .

("We have found her!")

. . . stretching the word for emphasis.

(As if at a checkpoint. . .)

The family carried their clothes,

some cans of tinned food, and a few personal possessions.

At first everybody was together.

At first everybody was together.

(She said her name slowly . . .)

Father and daughter eventually moved on

(Through) streets (that) reeked of death.

The group reached a checkpoint.

After more than a year of war,

children have become familiar

with the sight . . . of violent death.

The group reached a checkpoint.

The group reached . . .

There were soldiers on the tanks

and soldiers on the ground.

They approached the people . . .

firing above their heads.

. . . a checkpoint

They were held . . .for six to seven hours.

"She started screaming

and told me she wanted her mother."

The family was reunited.

Bonds of family are tight.

The displaced are packed into small areas.

Bonds of family are tight.

Word travels fast in Gaza City when kin arrive. . .

(She) was comforted by the people who loved her.

She had a favorite cousin (who was not there).

There were sweets and potato chips,

She had a favorite cousin (who was not there).

They used to play together in the street.

("Life used to be normal. She would run and play,")

Bonds of family are tight.

But now, whenever there's shelling,

she points and says, 'plane!'.

It is hard to call a child (who survives) lucky.

Who knows what will return in dreams and memories.

It is hard to call a child (who survives) lucky.

-- -- -- -- ..

Fragments excerpted from BBC World article "What happened to the young girl in a photograph of Gaza detainees?" by Fergal Keane. (With additional reporting by Haneen Abdeen, Alice Doyard, Moose Campbell and Rudaba Abbass.)

...............
Reflection: First of all, I love fragments. They're more like we think, they reflect how we process, how we perceive and how we feel. We don't experience things seamlessly, but our brain stitches bits and pieces together and tries to make it look like an immaculate birth. Think how a memory works. When you first have it, it might be a little messy. Picture an old guy at Thanksgiving sharing a memory, how easily he can get distracted by charged associations that crowd in, like the time when uncle George tipped the canoe over. If this is one of those memories that has been shared a hundred times before then what you get is the streamlined time-honored edited version, but my point is, the mind experiences the world and the past as a collage, an overlay, a pastiche, a palimpset. When you are hearing a story from a good (oral) story teller, it should "smell" fresh. Because, as one story teller told me, he is seeing the story unfold before his inner eye and is saying what he sees. When we write prose, any kind of prose, we following rules, the rules of grammar, to please an editor and to make it easy for the reader. We are writing in complete sentences. We organize and finish our thoughts. In writing poetry, all the rules go out the window. When I read a poignant article, like the one about this 3-year-old Gazen girl who showed up in a photograph of a group of men (stripped down to their underwear at a checkpoint), and based on that image, they go about trying to find her in war-ravaged northern Gaza, and they do find her (!), my brain sometimes does a funny thing: It starts deconstructing the prose of the language and looking for the poetry, which is all in the fragments. And, as you can see, the fragments that begin to coalesce and cohere are not necessarily chronological, because, for me, the story is not chronological. The events and bits of evidence that were originally woven together in tracking the location of this girl (by a threadbare team of caring people) were not necessarily in any particular order. (Whatever I added to the story in my prose poem is in parentheses.) One thing I did, even though the girl's real name was given in the article, was to protect her name, because, even though I am telling Israel that the this 3 year old girl whom they might have easily erased and buried under rubble in a missile or drone attack, didn't wind up being a number in the disputed count of casualties, she survived. She has a name, a very beautiful name, but Israel doesn't deserve to know it. Because, not only are they not her kin, or of her community, but they would have killed her just as they killed her little cousin with whom she once played in the streets.