The Flagship

By Matthew Parish

Tuesday 3 November 2026

They call it flagship. This, I think, is rich,

A line of coaches stained with God knows what,

Their flanks displaying every kind of ditch

Through which the pride of railways might have got.

The paint, once blue, has taken on the shade

Of things best left unmentioned, or unpaid.

Along the platform filthy fellows beat

At bits of iron with a sort of rage,

As though by banging metal in the sleet

They might repair the railway, or the age.

Each hammer-blow rings out across the yard,

Proclaiming that existence must be hard.

Beneath the wheels, a brown and steaming flow

Disgorges from the carriages in streams,

And trickles down to where the sleepers go,

To mingle with the gravel and our dreams.

The station's drains, apparently, are free

To take what civilisation cannot see.

A drunk lies snoring on a wooden seat,

His face the colour of a pickled beet.

Beside him, sacks of rubbish mount in heaps,

While through the whole performance soundly sleeps

This solitary citizen, whose snore

Suggests he knows what railways really are for.

Above, November spreads its lid of grey,

A sky that hasn't smiled since early May.

The cold gets in beneath one's collar bone,

And makes each traveller feel more alone.

The workers clang. The sewage finds its course.

The drunk emits a noise resembling Morse.

Kharkiv, behind us, bears a greater stain

Than anything upon this wretched train.

Its broken buildings stand against the sky,

And people learn to live, and not ask why.

Yet here the railway, in its proud decay,

Insists that all is splendid anyway.

Perhaps this is what flagship journeys mean:

A grand announcement, followed by obscene

Arrangements for the ordinary man,

Who boards because he must, and while he can.

The destination's Lviv, far away,

And getting there will swallow up a day.

At last some whistle gives a mournful cry.

The hammers stop. The clouds remain on high.

The drunk turns over, dreaming of his bed,

The sacks pile higher round his sleeping head.

We creep towards the western, darkening plain,

And nothing seems more human than this train.

For all its dirt, its stink, its battered pride,

There's something oddly decent left inside:

The need to travel, though the world looks grim,

To find some place beyond the platform's rim.

And so we go, with November coming down,

From one half-broken, half-defiant town.