Narrated Essay: The Hum of a Boy's Dream

On bearing witness.

Alexander Kori Girard, from A Song for Water

Today. Scenes from inside Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, where thousands are sheltering and seeking care.

Three or four children are curled in each bed.

A fatherly-looking doctor pauses. He wraps a child in his arms. He turns her face so she won’t notice how he is cupping silent sobs into her hair.

There’s an ache in my arms. In my bones. In the ground beneath my feet. In the leaves.

And this reminder from Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye that we are never not in it together…

Shoulders

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

- Naomi Shihab Nye, “Shoulders” from Red Suitcase