Found Not Found is a poem about the genocide in Gaza by Z regular, writer, poet, and performer George Capaccio:

You know me.
You’ve seen me playing ball with friends,
riding my bike past bomb-smashed buildings,
travelling with my family on a wooden cart
piled high with bags of clothes and rolled up beds,
on our way to yet another shelter
with our donkey straining to pull us there.

You’ve watched me picking through rubble
in search of something to trade for a piece of bread,
anything to keep us alive for another day or two.
Maybe you saw me outside the hospital
where my uncle had been a patient
till a soldier shot him in the head
because he couldn’t move fast enough.

I might have been the child on a stretcher
with half of my face burned down to the bone
from the white phosphorous the enemy used
against families crowded into combustible tents.
Did you notice me with the other children
waving bowls, plates, anything we could find
to hold the food from a simmering cauldron
in the kitchen staffed by caring helpers?

Please don’t forget our faces
and how they look cinched from hunger.
We are all like that now.
Did you see my sister, Rana,
the little girl on the hospital bed.
She had lost so much weight
her flesh had become a thin curtain
barely covering her bones.

Now imagine you are not a remote observer
but someone who actually lives in Gaza,
and you are looking for me,
your precious eight-year-old son.
My name is Samer.
I am the boy in plaid shorts and torn tee shirt
with the image of Captain Majid,
a fantasy soccer hero
about to score the winning goal.

You are distraught beyond words,
calling out my name,
asking everyone you pass
if they’ve seen me —
the boy who carries his soccer ball
wherever he goes,
just like Captain Majid,
who always triumphs over impossible odds.

As hard as you try,
you can’t stop seeing those images,
of medics retrieving body parts
after missiles hit that outdoor market;
of survivors embracing their martyred loved ones
bound in cloud-white shrouds and placed in rows
outside a barely functioning hospital
where the unknown dead are left without names
on their unmarked shrouds.

You come to a spreading pool of sewage
close to an encampment for displaced families.
Since Israel destroyed the sewage pumps,
such pools are becoming rampant in Gaza.
People have to endure the stench
and the growing threat of disease.
You make it across, one stone at a time,
and soon come to a team of workers
searching for survivors from last night’s strike.

You pray to God I found shelter
and am not buried in the rubble.
An old man sitting on a concrete slab
beckons you to come to him.
“I’ve seen your child,” he says,
and your heart is ten times lighter.
“He is there,” he says,
pointing toward a flattened school.

As you walk on, the old man calls out,
“A woman saw him in the street.
She took him inside when she heard the drones.”
You remember what happened a week ago
when Israeli planes bombed a different school
killing over 100 people sheltering there.
You scramble over a pile of debris,
and that’s when you find me.

Imagine I am waving from a doorway.
“Baba,” you hear me call. “I’m over here.”
I know how upset you must be,
but still you gently lift me up
and hold me in your arms
for I am your son, and I feel
how much you love me.

“We were so worried,” you say
kissing my face with tears streaming down yours.
“We thought we would never see you again.”
Now imagine how heavy and warm I feel in your arms
and how joyful you feel to have found me.
I insist on bringing my soccer ball,
which I hold in both my hands
as you carry me back to the road.

In a little while you grow tired
too tired to go on holding me.
So you set me down and take my hand,
and we take our time going back
to the makeshift tent where we shelter.
The road widens, becomes clear.
You watch me toss the ball
a few yards ahead of us.

Imagine seeing me run after it.
Like my hero Captain Majid,
I kick the ball as hard as I can
using my invincible power shot.
It soars over the fallen buildings,
over the streets of our once-beautiful city,
over the piles of garbage and rubble,
over the many broken, terrified lives.

Like them, we lift our eyes skyward
to watch my soccer ball fly ever higher
as if it were a sign, a promise
that God has not forsaken us,
that the world has come to its senses
and will do everything in its power
to bring us peace, ironclad and compassionate.

“Baba,” I say. “May I look for my ball?”
You nod, but I see the sadness in your eyes as you let go of my hand knowing
there is nothing else to be done.
And so I run, faster and faster,
convinced I have the power to fly,
and in a way I do
till my breath becomes too faint for you to hear,
and I am gone, as you feared I would be.

You stand by the doorway in a state of shock,
unable to fathom the emptiness in your heart.
In a moment you come back to the present
and find me once again in your arms,
my invincible soccer ball still on the ground,
where I dropped it.