Last Orders in Lviv

By Matthew Parish, Associate Editor

Saturday 22 August 2026

The shutters should be down. Instead, the bar

Keeps one blue lamp above the bottles lit,

As though the war, like rain, had travelled far

And missed this cellar. She makes nothing of it.

Her mojito sweats beside her bandaged arm,

Mint leaves and ice, absurdly clean and green.

The barman asks if lifting it does harm.

She says, A little. She is twenty-three.

Outside, the curfew owns the cobbled street;

A distant thump rolls somewhere through the town.

Nobody looks. We have grown used to it —

The little pause, then putting glasses down.

They pulled two fragments out. One bullet stayed

A while, then worked its way towards the skin.

She tells me this as if a bill were paid,

Or some dull story she has tired of telling.

Her fingers cannot quite persuade the straw,

So with the other hand she brings it near.

Rum, lime and sugar — what civilians are

Reduced to when they will not live in fear.

I think of English closing-time, the rain,

Last orders shouted underneath strip lights,

The taxi home, the ordinary pain

Of having wasted ordinary nights.

Here time is rationed differently. The dead

Are counted every morning with the news;

The living drink whatever can be had

And learn what parts of living not to lose.

She laughs. The plaster at her elbow shows

A stain the colour roses turn when dried.

Someone behind us chooses songs he knows;

Someone produces cigarettes outside.

Perhaps this is not courage. Courage sounds

Too much like speeches polished for the grave.

She merely has some holes where there were wounds

And wants the ordinary things we save:

A drink made badly, music played too loud,

A room forbidden after twelve, a friend,

The right to sit among a thinning crowd

And not enquire how history will end.

The ice collapses softly in her glass.

Another boom. She doesn’t turn her head.

The minutes after curfew slowly pass.

She lifts the drink.

The city is not dead.