After the Siren
- 3 minutes ago
- 2 min read
By Matthew Parish
Monday 6 June 2026
The buses still arrive on time,
or near enough that nobody
remarks upon the difference.
A woman buys black bread,
counts her change,
folds it twice into a purse
already thinning at the seams.
Outside, another warning starts,
its tired metallic rise and fall,less like alarm
than something practised into habit.
Heads incline,then lift again.
There is shopping to be done.
The cafés wipe their tables clean.
Children chase a punctured ballbetween the sandbags,
learning measurements of danger
that no teacher
ever thought to write upon a board.
The dead leave quietly.
Their photographs appear
amongst announcements of concerts,
lost dogs,
electricity returning
to one more district of the city.
The eye accepts them equally.
It is not courage,
at least not in the stories
people tell themselves at night.
It is exhaustionfinding another name,
the long apprenticeship
to what cannot be altered.
One winter follows one spring.
The chestnut trees insist
upon their annual deceit,
covering the broken streetswith blossoms
that remember nothing
of the craters underneath.
Visitors ask,
How do you bear it?
As though endurance
were a skill acquired,
instead of what remains
when every better choice
has gone elsewhere.
And somewhere,
beyond another river,
another field,
another line on someone’s map,
young men rehearse
the ancient trade
of making strangers disappear.
The newspapers count
villages, brigades,
promises, sanctions,
missiles intercepted,
all the careful arithmetic
by which disaster
tries to look complete.
Yet none of it explains
how morning always comes,
or why the kettle boils,
or why one still replaces
a cracked windowpane
knowing perfectly
it may not see another dawn.
Perhaps the difference
between living and dying
shrinks first into an interval:
the seconds after impact,
the silence after names are called,
the pause before a message
answers with no answer.
After that,
life is simply what continues,
death what does not,
and neither wears the solemn face
imagined by the distant.
Only the day remains,
its ordinary demands,
its queue for medicine,
its tram crossing the square,
its evening lightsettling without judgment
on those who came home
and those who did not.
