I had been working on Exeter University’s Ukrainian Wartime Poetry project for two years when the invitation came to travel to the country’s largest literary festival. I didn’t exactly relish the prospect of a journey to a war zone, but I was assured that visiting BookForum in Lviv, a city so far west it’s practically in Poland, would be safe. I had been leading poetry workshops with exiles and editing translations of Ukrainian poetry, including soldier Artur Dron‘’s collection We Were Here, published last November. So, when Artur and his translator – the incredible poet Yuliya Musakovska – asked me and language professor Hugh Roberts to attend, I couldn’t say no.

What I didn’t expect was to fall in love with the city: its gorgeous architecture, its cafes, its parks full of trees, and its writers. Lviv’s inspired, robust literary culture puts the UK’s own underfunded, last-gasp scene to shame. On the first night of the Forum, Hugh and I attended a nonstop music and poetry event in a nightclub at which both Artur and Yuliya read their poems, and revealed what utter rock stars they truly are. I don’t know why I was surprised; We Were Here, written on the frontline before Artur was even 22, is a masterpiece. It is full of lucid, clear-eyed accounts of his experiences in the trenches and on the battlefield, elegies for his comrades, humane portraits of the suffering of bereaved civilians and furious adaptations of liturgies and prayers. One of his poems is published below.

The next day, Yuliya and I read our own poems together, and then Hugh and I were hustled off to meet the mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi. We watched a presentation about the Unbroken Institute, an enormous hospital development in the Lviv region dedicated to the rehabilitation of casualties. It includes world-leading prosthetics design facilities, physiological and psychological care units, and maternity wards. It is always augmenting, preparing for casualties yet to come and the long-term legacy of this war, its manifold trauma.

When, on day two of the book festival, a siren sounds, it is so soft, so unlike the ear-splitting sirens of my RAF childhood, that at first I think it’s a drill. Then comes a recording of a man who tells us, in the gentlest voice I’ve ever heard, that there is an air raid and we must seek shelter.

I pull a jumper on over my pyjamas and make my way down to the shelter – a staff kitchen area in the basement. Slowly other people filter in, including a family with two children who are shown into a room which I hope has beds. Children all over the city are listening to the sounds of this murderous sky. It turns out to be the worst bombardment Lviv has yet suffered.

Under the migraine-inducing strip lights, everyone huddles over their phones, watching the trajectories of the Russian missiles on Telegram channels such as War Monitor – red, green and yellow lines pointing straight at Lviv. My new shelter buddy Bartosz has an app that delivers blow-by-blow updates, including a meme of a furiously smoking monkey to indicate there is time between missiles for a quick cigarette. This is war in a digital age. Hugh receives a text to say that two Russian Kinzhal missiles are coming and, sure enough, I hear and feel them. Down here they sound like plosives (“puh … puh”) rather than explosives, and a muted tremor comes up through the soles of my feet. I am afraid of what is happening above ground, and fervently grateful to the defence units trying to shoot down the drones.

It would be easy to say that when I tentatively step out the next day, there is only a faint whiff of burnt rubber, that repairs have already begun, that Lviv is unbroken. Yet energy infrastructure has been targeted, boding a cold winter; a six-year-old boy has suffered a traumatic brain injury; a whole family have been killed including Anastasiia Hrytsiv – the same age as my daughter, the same long hair and bright smile. Just that night she had been texting her father on the frontline, checking he was OK.

The BookForum is in full fuck-you-Putin mode, defiantly thriving, and I wander through stalls piled high with exquisitely produced books and wonder at the richness of book culture here. Our last event is a bilingual reading with three soldier poets, Dron’, Ihor Mitrov and Fedir Rudyi. I read the English versions of Fedir’s poems; they are tender, grounded and as acutely observant and sensitive as Fedir is in person.

After the reading, the three poets hold each other. They are all in pain. These war poems are hard to read, and all three of them have injuries, psychological and – in Artur’s case – physical: nerve damage in his left arm inflicted by a Russian drone. A red scar wipes out a section of his beautiful sleeve tattoo of trees. He is still receiving rehabilitation treatment at the Unbroken Institute. Many of his friends – also terrific poets – have been killed, including the incredible Maksym Kryvtsov.

Beloved poets, beloved city, I am praying for an end to Russian aggression, I am wishing you safe from harm.

Prayer by Artur Dron’

Translated from the Ukrainian by Yuliya Musakovska

With the swimmers, swim,
with the travellers, travel,
as they say in church.

With the one who was raped
and is expecting a child,
breathe, breathe, breathe.
With the child whose hair has gone grey,
prepare a backpack for school.

With the frostbitten, freeze,
with the shellshocked, vomit in the trench.
With the tank commander,
who’s been missing since October,
be found, be pieced together
from scattered body parts.
Consecrated particles
as they say in church.

And also be
with the one who eats pot noodles with cold water;
with the one who was captured but will never talk;
with the one who was conceived
but didn’t get born.
And be with the one
who didn’t get to give birth.

And also be
with the two girls
somewhere in the Rivne region, do you remember?
We were driving to the east, in a convoy,
and they stood watching at the roadside,
and put their hands on their hearts.

And then I understood everything.

• Prayer is taken from We Were Here by Artur Dron’, published by Jantar. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.