BY

Fatena Abu Mostafa

Ceasefire

A word.

Heavy with silence.

It floods the headlines

like morphine

injected

into the veins

of a dying world.

A numbness.

A slow drip of denial.

Day by day,

just enough

to keep us breathing,

in a life

that has forgotten

how to live.

We wait.

And wait.

And wait—

until even waiting

gets tired of waiting.

We hope.

Until hope

packs its bags.

We write.

Until the world

closes the book

on our stories,

our poems,

our stubborn, aching hope.

Every day we survive,

we die

a hundred times.

This is not life.

It is the absence

of death.

We fall asleep

begging the nightmare to end.

We wake—

and find

it has just begun.

We are filled with pain

you cannot see.

Sorrow

you cannot measure.

Our grief

hides in the walls

of our chests.

We walk—

but our souls

trail behind us,

like torn wings.

Tell me—

what crime

did we commit

to deserve this sentence?

What sin

earned us

this endless punishment?

Oh world,

so loud

in its silence.

Block your ears.

Shut your eyes.

Spare yourselves the burden

of seeing us.

But please—

I beg you—

do not call us

heroes.

We are not made of steel.

We are not built for war.

We are human—

fragile, soft,

made for laughter,

not for sirens.

We hunger.

We thirst.

We love.

We dream

of travel,

of study,

of a life

not written in rubble.

We resist—

yes.

But not

at the cost

of our children’s hunger.

Not

at the cost

of our hollow bellies.

Not

at the cost

of the homes

we spent years

trying to build.

We hate death.

Not because we fear it,

but because we’re forced

to live with it.

We loved life—

until it left us.

Do nothing,

if nothing is all you can do.

But do not

romanticize our ruin.

Do not

pin medals

on our pain

and call it courage.

We have not adapted.

We are not unbreakable.

We are only enduring—

and we are

on the edge

of what’s left

of our patience.