I was in Syria in 2007 with a small group
of American writers traveling through a few countries
in the Middle East.
That was before the civil war.
The war in Iraq was raging.
Syria had taken in 750,000 refugees.
But it was a perfectly functioning police state
when I was there, and not that long afterwards,
the civil war broke out.
And I thought about all those university students
we had spoken to, and to this day,
I am haunted by what must have become of their lives, whatever
became of their lives.
This poem is thinking about-- there
was a woman anesthesiologist who helped
guide our little group around because you needed
a woman to take women into the women's entrance of the,
as she pronounced it, mosque, the mosque.
She did, with her college-aged son, escape early to Paris,
and she now--
she worked first for Medecins Sans Frontières,
Doctors Without Borders, and now she works for the UN HCR.
So I think about her a lot.
She breathes in the scent.
As the front of a box would miss the sides,
the back, the grief of the living
misses the grief of the dead.
It is like a woman who goes to the airport
to meet the planes from a country she long ago lived in.
She knows no passenger, but stands near as they
exit, still holding their passports.
She breathes in the scent of their clothes.