Be to her, Persephone…

One year ago this week, 10-year-old Noran Iyad Deeb was shot dead by an Israeli sniper while singing the national anthem and clapping her hands in her UN flagged school in Rafah. I will never forget that day; that day when the line between journalist and mother faded forever. When I dropped my pen and began to cry along with her mother. Noran died in front of her younger sister. Noran loved and was loved. She smiled and brought smiles to the world. And as her mother told me when I spoke with her one day after she was killed, "her name means bright light, and that's precisely what she was-a bright light in a most dark place; a light that was brutally extinguished."

Maybe her spirit, and the hundreds of little spirits like hers, continue to flicker even on the darkest of nights.

Be to her, Persephone,

All the things I might not be:

Take her head upon your knee.

She that was so proud and wild,

Flippant, arrogant and free,

She that had no need of me,

Is a little lonely child

Lost in Hell, - Persephone,

Take her head upon your knee:

Say to her, "My dear, my dear,

It is not so dreadful here."

-Edna St. Vincent Millay