Kyiv has been pounded by missiles and jet-powered killer drones

For six straight days and nights.

I wrote to my oldest friend

How are you? Are you holding on?

She sent me her address. She wrote

After the victory, please come visit.

After the victory, I, who never saw a bomb shelter in my life

Who never heard the sound of a shahed piercing the sky,

I, who left too early and stayed away for too long,

Will fall on the earth and press it to my face,

Just as my grandmother must have done, when she survived the famine,

Just as my other grandmother surely did, after she came back home from nazi slavery,

At the end of that other war.

Then I’ll do something neither of them could ever do:

I’ll buy a plain ticket,

I’ll fly over the ocean,

I will come back home,

And, listen to me, you, the gods of this fucking war,

I will see my friend again,

Whose name is Victoria.