The Young Drinkers of Lviv
By Matthew Parish
Saturday 10 October 2026
The young come in at half past nine,
With cigarettes and borrowed cheer,
And order vodka, beer or wine,
As though the point of life were here.
Outside, the trams complain and grind,
The cobbled streets are slick with rain;
Inside, they drink to leave behind
The things that will not leave their brain.
A girl of twenty stares at glass,
Her lipstick marking where she’s been;
She watches other people pass
Across the cracked and smoky screen.
A boy beside her laughs too loud
At something nobody has said,
And tries to lose himself in crowds
Of thoughts he wishes he were dead.
They talk of love, of jobs, of war,
Of leaving for some better place;
Then order what they had before
And wear the same exhausted face.
The barman polishes a cup
With that peculiar patient skil
lOf men who’ve watched the young grow up
And seen them drink their futures still.
Beyond the windows, Lviv persists,
Its churches black against the sky;
The rain descends in silver mists,
The centuries go shuffling by.
The Habsburg ghosts have gone to bed,
The Polish poets turned to dust;
And all the things the living dread
Are waiting where the living must.
A siren sounds. Nobody moves.
The music carries on instead.
A drunken student vainly proves
That he is better off than dead.
His girlfriend smiles, then looks away,
And studies bubbles in her beer;
There is so very much to say,
And nothing anyone will hear.
For youth, they tell us, should be bright,
A golden time of love and song;
But youth in Lviv has learned at night
How very much the world goes wrong.
They drink because the morning comes,
Because the morning might not come;
Because the distant thunder drums,
And all the clever gods are dumb.
At two, the tables empty out,
The chairs are stacked, the glasses dried;
The last young lovers stagger out,
Still holding something back inside.
The barman turns the music down
And counts the money in the till;
Beyond him lies the sleeping town,
Which has survived, and suffers still.
And somewhere in the eastern dark,
Beyond the reach of Lviv’s last tram,
A shell illuminates a park,
A house, a road, a broken dam.
The young will sleep till nearly noon,
With aching heads and empty purses;
The world will end, or not, quite soon,
And neither outcome reimburses.
So let them have another round,
Another hour of borrowed light;
The happiness they haven’t found
May yet be waiting out of sight.
Though probably it isn’t there,
And drink is merely time on loan;
Still, for a moment, they can share
The fear of facing it alone.
