🎵 Title: “Our Students’ Occupation”

Verse 1
June light on the Rectorate stone,
Cardboard signs and borrowed megaphones.
We were writing on the skyline, “This is where it turns,”
Drinking instant coffee while the library burns.​

Mothers brought us soup at five a.m.,
Whispered, “You are ours, don’t be like them.”
Every blanket on the marble was a fragile vow,
That the fear of forty years would end somehow.​

Pre‑Chorus
We thought the tanks had melted in the morning sun,
We thought the end of one world meant a new one had begun.

Chorus
Raise a candle for the nights we didn’t sleep,
For the songs we sang so history could keep.
For the kids who turned a lecture hall into a fragile throne,
And believed that truth could stand there on its own.
We were shouting in the corridors of rain,
Now the silence counts our number like a train.
This is for the winter of our youth,
For the days we tried to turn a slogan into truth.​

Verse 2
We said: “No more leaders speaking in our name,
No more idols dressed in someone else’s shame.”
We kicked the party banners from the lecture floor,
Turned auditorium sixty‑five into an open door.​

But the counting rooms were somewhere far above,
Turning faces into data, faith into a file of numbers.
We learned how every promise can be bought and sold,
How a public square grows tired, and the cameras grow cold.
Pre‑Chorus
We thought the script was broken, but the cast just changed,
Same old building, just the furniture rearranged.

Chorus
Raise a candle for the nights we didn’t sleep,
For the questions that we buried far too deep.
For the kids who stood in rain outside the Parliament gate,
Thinking they could pull the calendar across the date.
We were shouting in the corridors of rain,
Now the years roll by like carriages of shame.
This is for the winter of our youth,
For the days we tried to turn a slogan into truth.​

Bridge
From “our students” to “our assets” in a single breath,
From a face that bears a future to a line item of debt.
We learned freedom is a language you cannot outsource,
A prayer you have to live in, not a package from the North.​

No one comes to save you with a ready‑made design,
You cannot subcontract a conscience or a spine.
Democracy’s an altar that no leader can complete,
If the students leave their candles at the door and take a seat.
Break (optional spoken / half‑sung)
“Will you still be there when winter ends?”
We asked each other softly, calling strangers friends.
Some stayed, some left, some learned to close their eyes,
Some still hear the echo when a faculty door swings wide.

Final Chorus
Raise a candle for the nights we didn’t sleep,
For the fragile, foolish promises we keep.
For the ones who still remember soup at five a.m.,
And for those who only know the campus as a firm.
We were shouting in the corridors of rain,
Now our children walk those halls and ask our names.
This is for the winter of our youth,
For the days we tried to turn a slogan into truth.

Outro
If there’s a day when walls grow thin again,
May they find the hidden footsteps where we ran.
And read upon the sleeping university stone:
“You are never just a number. This is also your home.”

Lalu Metev, January 8, 2026.

I begin in the threshold where a word is not yet born and silence still remembers its breath. I write to shape what insists on being carried forward — not as ornament, but as revealed truth. My practice moves like inner weather: shifts of memory, tenderness, and the questions that refuse to leave us. Genres are rooms of one house — poems, essays, fragments, genealogies, musical sketches — each a voice in a single resonant chord. Even silence has its essential place in that chord. I attend to the small gestures that disclose identity; to the secret bridges between private life and collective memory; to the quiet architecture of the spirit that needs no ceremony. My aim is language that opens rather than decorates — windows through which readers encounter their own inner sky. Form, conscience and intimacy guide me: introspection keeps me honest; conceptual shape grants the invisible weight; moral sensibility anchors each phrase. My professions — poet, publicist, jurist — lean together: law sharpens clarity, poetry humbles certainty, philosophy teaches listening to what is unsaid. If a single thread unites my work, it is this: to transmute vulnerability into luminous strength and to make silence a place of meaning. I am Lalu Metev — Bulgarian poet, essayist and jurist. I write to preserve what is delicate and essential in the human spirit, to follow traces of memory and dignity, and to find where the personal meets the universal. This is the path I walk; this is the voice I follow; this is the presence I offer.