On the Seventh Day
On the seventh day, do we rest?
No.
We wait.
We live forever on the threshold of anticipation.
We scroll through the minutes of the twenty-four hours, an article here, a statement or a tweet there, trying to sketch our day from the debris.
There is no roadmap here, save for the one charted by those who do not speak our tongue.
And we simply... endure.
We endure... and we dismantle.
We read the void between the lines more than the lines themselves.
We dissect the silence, and we distrust everything that seems natural.
For the natural is natural no longer.
And the quiet, in our lands, is not peace... but the breathing space of those who did not choose to fight.
On the seventh day,
A few shops part their doors with a certain shyness.
A shutter half-raised, a decision half-made.
Chairs return to the pavements,
The coffee is fired up again,
And the talk circles small things:
Prices, electricity, water, and deferred plans.
Everyone watches and waits.
The same faces... but with features drawn tight, their fear not yet spent.
And behind every sentence,
The shadow of another:
“If it starts again…”
If it starts again?
But it hasn’t ended yet, to start again.
A few kilometers away,
The earth is being blasted,
Blood flowing above and beneath it.
The stillness here is not an absence... it is a distance.
In this restless quiet,
Another noise rises.
A noise that isn't heard... but thought.
We scrutinize everything:
The faces of politicians,
Their raised fingers,
The tone of voice,
The timing of the release.
We watch the sky,
Not for its clarity,
But for the depth of its silence.
A distant plane,
A passing bike,
A door slammed shut,
All are possibilities.
We count the days.
The seventh day.
The stillness here is not peace.
It is the gap between two strikes.
And in this gap,
We try to live.
Briefly.
We laugh... without trust.
We plan... without certainty.
We sleep... half-awake.
A part of us stays vigilant,
Like a guard we cannot see.
We wake to the alarm, not the shelling, and we are surprised.
We make coffee slowly, as if relearning a ritual.
We open the news before the windows.
We write: “How are you?”
And the answer comes:
“Good... for now.”
We go out into the street.
We look at each other,
Searching for a lost reassurance.
Even the greetings have become fast,
Abrupt,
Unable to linger.
We do not only fear war,
But the habit of it.
That it becomes part of our day,
Our talk,
Our jokes.
We laugh sometimes...
Then suddenly fall silent.
As if the laugh itself has recoiled.
On the seventh day,
A question slips in quietly:
What do we do with all this exhaustion?
The shells might stop,
But their echo does not.
An exhaustion in the body,
In the eye,
In the heart that has learned to jump at any sound.
We don’t trust the quiet enough to relax.
We live on the edge of rest.
A rest deferred,
Conditional,
Liable to be cancelled.
We arrange our things differently.
We charge our phones more than we use them.
We track time... for every eventuality.
And inside us,
A longing so simple:
Quiet... just quiet.
A quiet that needs no explanation,
No monitoring,
No fear.
But we don’t know how to believe it.
So we go back to waiting.
We watch,
We analyze,
We read,
Then we read again.
We build our day on possibilities,
Not on certainties.
We say:
“We’ll see!”
As if our whole life
Were a suspended sentence.
And on the seventh day,
We declare no victory,
We mourn no loss.
We stand in the middle.
Between war and peace,
Between dread and calm,
Between sound and silence.
This middle ground...
Has become our place.
Our anxiety in this quiet
Is not weakness,
But memory.
A memory that has learned
That silence
Can be a warning.
And yet...
We go on.
We make our coffee,
We open our windows,
We watch the sky,
We reply to messages,
We laugh when we can,
And stay silent when we cannot.
We buy our bread,
We stop at the gas station,
We postpone our plans,
And we hide our unease.
And we try, despite everything,
To live an ordinary day...
Even if this “ordinary”
Is poised
On the threshold of waiting.