Prosepoem and image by Abdulghani Al-Shuaibi
What is the meaning of endurance? That was all—a simple question; one that pressed heavier with each night, as the sky cracked with fire and the earth groaned under falling stone. The great revelation had not come, perhaps would never come. Instead, there were the small and stubborn flames: a child tracing letters in dust with a broken pencil; an old woman kneading bread though the oven was shattered; a man planting seeds in the soil where shrapnel still glinted. These, here and there, were the miracles—lanterns struck unexpectedly in the dark.
Life stood still, if only for a breath, when mothers gathered the fragments of lullabies to hush trembling infants, or when a boy, barefoot and unbowed, launched his kite against a horizon lined with smoke. In the midst of ruins, there was form; in the stream of grief, a shape endured. The passing of hours—marked not by clocks but by sirens, not by calendars but by funerals—was turned, for a moment, into something almost permanent.
Here was the paradox: amid silence broken by artillery, voices persisted; amid absence, presence multiplied. This was revelation enough: not in grandeur, not in proclamations, but in the fierce ordinariness of living. The rubble was vast, the hunger sharp, the wounds unending. Yet in each shattered dwelling, life whispered still—life saying, stand still here.
