Here are a few lines of news,

which isn’t really news...

 

... except that we’re getting used to it

every day a little more

 

to war,

to the sirens that suddenly sound at night, early in the morning,

or when we’re peeling potatoes for lunch.

 

The explosions

(without knowing if they were Russian strikes or Ukrainian counter-attacks).

 

The moment when, every day - at 9am -

everything comes to a halt and the country observes a minute’s silence

in memory of those who gave their lives for freedom.

 

At those moments when we wait

for the siren to sound a second time

to announce the end of the air-raid warning

(and unlike the first unexpected siren, this one is so expected!),

and life can begin again,

at least for a while, with a sigh of relief:

‘What luck, this wasn’t our home or our town...’

(and a cynical realisation

that it was someone else’s house and town).

And that false sense of satisfaction that we’re taking care...

 

To conversations over Korean tea -

which also taste as bitter

as the best green tea that my tea master

gave me as a gesture of solidarity

when he heard I was supposed to be going to Ukraine

(telling me to drink it in place of him with the locals)...

 

Sipping slowly from these little cups,

filled to the brim,

you give yourself time to open up, to talk...

or not.

 

Because even here silence speaks,

shouts,

accuses,

questions,

weeps,

remembers and recalls

the life snatched from their hands...

Here, the future is spoken of only in sentences hanging in the air

after the victory... після перемоги.

 

To the said

(whispered, shouted)

and the unsaid...

Because behind every ‘everything will be fine (все буде добре)’

hides a sigh for the beloved,

whether at the front, missing, wounded or dead.

 

To this incredible, invincible hope

this strength not to give up,

to not submit to the aggressor ravaging their country...

It always blows me away

to see the flame in people’s eyes

or in the collections for ZSU (the Ukrainian army),

even when buying a book or a baguette.

That unshakeable desire to live.

 

And then there’s the beauty of everyday life

(ordinary but nevertheless!) that is glimpsed here

in wonder.

 

The smile of a man walking his dog,

a woman planting flowers in front of her house

(I think they were roses?),

an old lady swinging her granddaughter in front of her block of flats...

 

All very commonplace for you?

But in the middle of this third year of war

and beneath the visible and invisible ruins

these are the marks of the Resurrection!

 

And more and more I ask myself

what is the meaning of all this?

are we here simply to be here

- to listen, to live with, to pray -

or to become witnesses to the lives of the people who cross our paths?

To remind ourselves that their life

is in some way our own?