In Gaza’s Berry Fields

It’s a good day for picking strawberries. Layers of clouds have cooled the air, until the paths
beside the endless rows of plants are filled with families. Children run around the edges of the
field, tossing handfuls of berries into white buckets and at each other. Their hands and mouths,
stained with juice. A woman straightens up to rest her back. She looks for her sons who
helped all morning. They’re playing marbles with their friends near the road, the way children
have always played marbles, tracing circles in the dirt with a stick, taking aim and shooting.
Their laughter floats through the sky until it reaches her.

Something hot passes over her head. It feels as though her hair is on fire, but she knows the
sound of mortars and the smell that follows. She stays down. It’s coming from somewhere out
in the field behind her. Before she has time to run, before she has time to grab her sons off the
open edge of the road, a shell from the opposite direction explodes in the middle of the berry
field. The air fills with smoke and a brief hard silence. A tank rolls past the bulldozed houses.
Soldiers jump out of the top, guns loaded and pointed toward the field. Everyone is running
into the rows of ripe strawberries. Soldiers, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters. Shredded
pieces of clothing are hanging in the trees. Pieces of bodies are hanging in the trees. The
soldiers begin putting body parts in piles near the road, where the boys were playing marbles
five minutes ago.

The woman runs, tearing at her white head scarf as she moves down the muddy path through
the middle of the berry field. The head of her youngest son is on the greenhouse
at the end of the path. She sees it - 400 meters away. The head of her son is on the green
house. She kisses the head, puts it in the middle of her scarf and wraps it gently. He is her
baby. A small hand is caught in a tree above the greenhouse. She climbs onto the roof, picks
up the hand, kisses the fingers and places the hand beside the head. She ties the scarf and
holds it to her breast. Blood begins to spread across the front of her dress.

Her middle son’s torso lies in the dirt beside the piles of body parts. Little legs are lined up
beside it. There is so much blood, so much shattered bone, and burned skin; it is hard to tell
one leg from another. Most of them are missing feet. She picks up one with a brown sandal still
attached. Wiping away the blood with her dress, she kisses the foot and puts it beside the hand
of her youngest son in the bloody bundle she will hold against her body forever.

She sits down against the wall and tries to lift her arms toward heaven. Her bloody hands begin
chopping at the air in front of her, as if they can show how her children were torn apart, or how
her heart feels. When a soldier walks by, she grabs the end of his rifle and
points it at her belly. The soldier is young, but he is twice the age of her sons, who were just
playing marbles beside the berry field on a day in January in Northern Gaza, while their mother
finished filling the last bucket of the day with sweet, ripe strawberries.

Marjory Heath Wentworth
SC Poet Laureate

 “This project was funded in part by the City of Charleston Office of Cultural Affairs and the City of North Charleston Cultural Arts Program through their joint administration of the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant Program and the South Carolina Arts Commission which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund of the Coastal Community Foundation of SC.”