Second Strike

By Matthew Parish

Saturday 31 October 2026

At first there were a hundred, then five hundred,

Then thousands, coming slowly through the doors,

With bags and children, looking at the numbers

That promised trains, and nothing ever more.

The hours went by. The trains did not arrive.

The loudspeakers announced uncertain things:

Departures cancelled, platforms rearranged,

The useless information order brings.

And underneath the station, in the tunnels,

The people stood so close they shared their sweat.

The air was thick with breath and human failure.

There was no water. None had come as yet.

No breeze could reach us from the world above.

No space to sit, no place to stretch a leg.

A thousand bodies pressed against each other,

Too tired to curse, too dignified to beg.

Upon the platform lay some broken metal,

The wreckage of a Russian drone, still there

From yesterday. The pieces had been scattered

As though they had been dropped without a care.

A soldier waited. Both his feet were missing.

He looked towards the place the trains should come.

The war had taken nearly all his walking,

And left him waiting with the other scum

Of history, as those in power might call them:

The old, the dispossessed, the lame, the poor.

The people who had followed every order,

And found that orders meant precisely nothing more.

A man who stank of vodka tried to speak.

He leaned towards me, cheerful, wet and red.

I could not understand a word he muttered,

Nor half the things the loudspeaker had said.

And there an old woman stood quite unprotected,

Her face cut deep with lines of eighty years.

She watched the rails, indifferent to the danger,

Beyond the reach of any further fears.

The sky above was open to the Russians.

The station stood exposed beneath the sun.

She waited there because she had a ticket,

And tickets mean a journey has begun.

Or so we learn. We learn that trains have numbers,

That clocks mean something, that a queue proceeds,

That governments provide for their own people,

And somewhere there is someone who takes heed.

I thought of all the journeys I had taken,

The stations where a platform meant a train,

The casual irritation of a late one,

The certainty of getting home again.

And then I saw what separated us.

It was not nationality or age,

Nor courage, nor the business of surviving,

Nor some particular wisdom of the sage.

I had some money. That was all the difference.

Enough to leave the station in a car.

Enough to buy myself a little distance

From where the waiting people still all are.

The thought arrived with almost no emotion.

A simple calculation, clear and cold:

I could depart. The others had to linger.

Their tickets were worth less than what I held.

I left them there. The soldier and the woman,

The drunk, the children, all the sweating crowd.

The railway clocks continued with their business.

The announcements carried on, confused and loud.

And minutes later came another missile,

Or drone, another Russian gift of fire.

The station burned far into that dark evening,

The flames climbing higher, and then higher.

How many vanished? How many lay wounded?

How many never reached the trains they sought?

The numbers were unknown. The night was burning.

And nobody could count what had been bought

With all that waiting, all that quiet patience,

The hours of heat, the thirst, the stifling air.

I thought about the soldier with no feet,

And whether, when it struck, he still was there.

I thought about the woman on the platform,

Her ancient face turned upwards to the sky.

She had survived so much to reach that station.

I could not bear to wonder if she’d died.

And somewhere in the smoke, amidst the wreckage,

There may have been a timetable still lit,

Announcing some departure for the morning,

As though the world had not quite finished with it.

I had escaped. There was no pride in knowing.

No lesson worth the privilege of the fare.

Just money in my pocket, and the knowledge

That I was here, and they were waiting there.

And late that night, when Dnipro still was burning,

I understood what freedom sometimes means:

The right to leave a place where others cannot,

And live amongst the things one might have seen.