Unscheduled Stop

By Matthew Parish

Friday 18 September 2026

Somewhere beyond Kyiv the train gives up,

Not at a station, merely where the fields

Have turned September-coloured, and a cup

Left on a table trembles. Someone yields

The news in Ukrainian: drones. We climb

Down awkwardly, with bags and cigarettes,

Into the mud. It seems a foolish time

For dying. Everyone checks their internet.

The railwaymen point firmly at the ditch,

The bushes and the low ground by the track.

A woman in a coat too fine for which

This morning was intended wanders back

To find a place behind an elder tree.

Two soldiers smoke. A child examines stones.

An old man pisses with tranquillity

Behind a bush. Above us something drones.

Or perhaps not. The ear invents the sound

Once told to listen. Every distant thrum

Becomes a motor searching out the ground,

And conversation dwindles, voices numb.

The Kyiv train, absurdly long and still,

Waits empty in the pale September light,

Its windows catching field and wooded hill

As though no war had travelled through the night.

We stand dispersed, obedient to fear,

Strangers made briefly intimate by this:

A suitcase sinking in the mud, a near

And unexplained acquaintance with the abyss.

Someone produces biscuits. Someone laughs

At something that was probably not funny.

A businessman in spotless shoes photographs

The mud that has already claimed his money.

And there it is: the ordinary world,

Insisting on itself beneath the threat —

A plastic bag, a cigarette-end curled,

A girl annoyed her trousers have got wet.

Perhaps this is what danger mostly means:

Not trumpets, courage, speeches, flags unfurled,

But crouching inconveniently in greens

And browns, while death goes elsewhere through the world.

We do not see the drone. We never know

What village, road or railway drew its eye.

The minutes gather heavily and slow;

Nobody says aloud that we might die.

Then suddenly the railwaymen appear

And wave us from the bushes to the train.

The danger, without ending, is not here.

We climb aboard, embarrassed by the rain.

Doors shut. The carriage lights resume their glow.

Phones charge. Tea comes. Someone starts to snore.

The fields begin their westward-moving show

Exactly as they had an hour before.

And Lviv remains a timetable away,

A promised platform underneath the lamps,

While somewhere eastward, in the breaking day,

Another train has stopped among the swamps.

What stays is not the terror but the wait:

Wet shoes, cold hands, the bushes and the clay,

And that small knowledge, neither grand nor great,

That life resumed because death looked away.