Believe it or not, Ukrainians have now become the best crisis managers in the world. After all, unimaginable things happen to us every day, and we continue to cope with them—or not.
“We have no windows; the event is cancelled,” the morning message startles me on the train to Kyiv. I was, in fact, heading to the poetic evening, “Light Poetry of Dark Times.” For several days, I was busy preparing posters and announcements and coordinating the entire process with the poets. Half-awake, I get indignant: “Don’t you have any flexibility? Maybe we can move it to another hall or another time?”
And then it finally hits me: “No windows” literally means no windows. Physically. Shattered windows. I feel a pang of shame for my thoughtless remarks. You don’t hear the shelling on the train. Yet, that January morning, Kyiv awoke to the thunderous bombardment of Russian rockets. It’s surreal–an evening of poetry amidst the chaos of war.
“Olena, we’re going ahead with the event,” comes the swift reply from “Osvitoria Hub,” an event centre in Kyiv. I had a feeling they’d make it happen against all odds.
Because Ukrainians have now become the world’s finest crisis managers. It’s about preparing for all possible outcomes, demonstrating award-winning logistics skills, dancing through time management pirouettes, and strategising like the world’s best grandmasters. Every day, we juggle numerous scenarios: whether a Russian missile strike comes or doesn’t, whether the air raid siren will send all your plans down the pot and whether the kids will stay home or go to school. Russian missiles are the spokes in our wheels. Our enemies live in loyalty to a death cult. They want nobody to stay alive.
I enter the room, pick up pieces of glass from the floor, and peer through them as if they were ice. Cardboard boxes cover the windows, and panes are meticulously shielded with special films—a sign of a bitter experience. These are the new times we live in, the new experiences we face. Sometimes, my heart feels shattered, tucked away in a cardboard box somewhere.
I think about living amidst the unthinkable. Yet, it’s equally unthinkable that the poetic evening unfolds despite it all.
After spending the entire day assembling these windows, the Hub’s managers come to thank me once the event is over. They mention that the poems had helped them relax a bit, almost like a healing balm. Indeed, it was light poetry for dark times.
When poetry is a search for light, prose is documenting the times we live in. Painful, wild, rough, harsh, cruel. But who will read all our books about the war?
“Who? The next countries where war will come. Europeans are on the lookout,” answers writer Marina Kumeda, who first published her Kyiv war diaries in France. Take us, for instance, currently engrossed in “Sarajevo for Beginners” by Ozren Kebo and similar works by other Balkan authors. Literature provides the lens through which we view an unpredictable future. It also allows us to contemplate the unimaginable.
But this can only truly be felt on your own skin. For instance, spending just one night under Russian missile bombardment in a city where each of us becomes a target. That’s why foreigners don’t understand us, no matter how many articles about the war they read.
I remember a conversation from 2019, overheard by chance during coffee, between two incredible teachers from Donbas. “I had two houses, I lost both. I don’t even tell them [other Ukrainians—ed.] anymore; they still wouldn’t understand,” they said. Colleagues from other Ukrainian cities at that time truly couldn’t imagine what it was like to lose a home due to war. Now, we understand it better—on a visceral level.
I asked my friends on Facebook, “What unimaginable things have now become a normal part of your life?” The question unleashed a torrent of comments, filled with wild yet already mundane shared experiences.
Sleeping on the floor. Sleeping during explosions. Falling asleep right after explosions.
Falling asleep half an hour before the estimated time for the Russian missiles to reach your city.
You can tell the difference between types of rockets and assess the level of danger even in your sleep.
Living through a curfew. Living without dreams and without a future.
When funerals are the place where you most often meet friends.
Teaching your children in a bomb shelter.
Writing music during air raid alarms and knowing that it’s more important.
The shock: when someone continues to listen to Russian music after the city was pounded by Russian rockets all night.
Drawing war.
Making love during air raids.
Renovating your beloved apartment in a city that Russians shell every week.
When neighbours use a power drill, even during shellings.
Buying new windows in advance as a precaution in case of a shockwave because “it will be more expensive later.”
Saying, “Oh, well, we were planning to change those windows anyway, they were old,” the morning after Russian missiles left a crater in your courtyard.
“Investigating the genocide of your own people during this genocide while also enjoying a good coffee and structuring your workday,” answered writer and human rights activist Larysa Denysenko.
Wishing for death.
Understanding that you yourself are ready to kill.
For me, this revelation came a few days before the full-scale invasion. Then, over the weekend, we watched several war movies in a row — including “Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die” by Akhtem Seitablayev. Before that, I avoided such films– they seemed emotionally unbearable. But on that fateful night, the anticipation of a major war hung thick in the air. As we walked out of the theatre into the frosty Kyiv air to clear our heads, the topic shifted to whether we could kill ourselves. It soon became apparent that, indeed, we could. My friends had just returned from a training session on surviving in the city during wartime, and they were sharing harrowing advice: “Bodies must be disposed of, preferably vertically, to conserve space.” At that moment, it seemed unfathomable. Yet, a month later, this grim reality would envelop Kyiv.
Once, looking at photos of dead enemies was also unthinkable. Once these boys pulled our braids. Now, they send us photos of half-decayed bodies of occupiers at the frontline. They boast. Just like cats that bring a mole they caught and lay it at their owner’s feet. Every time, I don’t know what to reply.
Watching the children of war.
In the photo, there is a daughter of friends—a baby in a crib surrounded by dozens of military radios. The baby ‘helped’ was to pack these for their parents, who are volunteers at the front. It will be a story to tell their grandchildren if the world isn’t destroyed by then. In the Ukrainian version of the family album “Our Child,” you can confidently add a page titled “My First Volunteer Packing.”
Noticing grey hair on the young.
The age feels somehow different now. I’m not even sure if there are any truly young people left in Ukraine. Living amidst the unimaginable adds years of experience in a way that two years of full-scale war feels like twenty. Yet, you cherish simple moments twenty times over—like being with those you love.
In a conversation once, Oksana Zabuzhko said to my friend, “Ah, you’re immortal until thirty.” She explained that until a certain age, one doesn’t feel the limits of mortality or the fragility of their own body. Now, my friend, who is not yet thirty, has already written her will. That’s the unimaginable.
With the war, it feels like we’re all characters in a classical Greek tragedy—living each day alongside our own death. We have coffee with it, wake up and fall asleep with thoughts of it, as if we are in love with it.
I don’t watch movies at all anymore. What’s the point? What could they show that’s more surreal than this life I live? That is how we will remember these times.
But the most accurate thought about the unthinkable things is that the unthinkable things as such have disappeared altogether. Those who haven’t lived through this may find it hard to comprehend. Everything is possible. Perhaps everything feels different now, not just the hardships, but the most profound changes. The key is to piece together our hearts every time they are shattered by these shockwaves of horror. To gather ourselves anew. To live, because that’s exactly what the enemy aims to steal from us. And to get together from time to time to read poems—the light verses in these dark times.
