Air

every Palestinian child killed

is someone I will never know

you might say

I wouldn’t know them anyway

because before they’d have grown

I’ll have died, & yet

we might have exchanged

fleeting gusts of air, theirs

blown here from Rafah in Gaza, mine

blown there from small town Vermont

they bombed into fragments

picked off by snipers

skin & bones in a mother’s arms

while I slow & slip & sink

& succumb to old age

every you & I, we are the same