We reach the frontier and we have to wait,
lined up beside a mile long queue of wrecked and
battered cars, advancing to be scoured for spares.
Another offer to help a neighbour’s fight.

Processed and permitted, our group of time-warn
trucks is hurried under escort to Lviv. We speed
past golden domes and strips of land
hand tended by stooping men and women,
hoeing livings from their soil. Mingled strips of forest,
tillage, grazing horses, cows flicker past. More golden
domes. The roads are scarred with potholes –
unbottomed, unrepaired. Patched, welded, smokey
cars drive on, holding on to Soviet simplicity.

We cross red lights, and cock a snook
at trams which wait for us – in this land at war,
that’s caught in limbo between its would-be
conquerors, and our world of affluence and pensions,
of Payment Plans and Carbon-Friendly Schemes.

Workers’ flats, and jaded concrete workshops
guide us in, then at last the centre and its mediaeval wealth,
it’s untouched harmonies, its cobbled streets, its towers.

That night, ushered to our luxury hotel
by curfew we sleep the night away,
and do not hear the sirens heralding missiles
which fall beyond the city limits and our dreams.