Pale Blue Vein

The count of the dead
in Gaza is rising. Last
night 15,000, 6,000 children.
It could be me
there with a dead baby. No one
decreed I’d be born
in a row house in Philadelphia.
No one wrote in the Book of Life
that my father would escape
the pogroms, carried
on his brother’s shoulders
through the snow from Kyiv to the sea.
There was a time
I thought the pain of the other
was not like my pain. Babies
slaughtered in Israel.
Every five minutes a child dies in Gaza.
It could be our baby.
Her eyebrow, its perfect arc,
the pale blue vein
that sweeps out
from the tip of her brow,
as though some lesser god
gave up on the rest
of the world and in her idleness just
added this extra touch
of beauty to beauty.