After the Siren

By Matthew Parish, Associate Editor

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.