Milada
„Město vidím veliké, jehož sláva hvězd se bude dotýkat.“
“I see a great city whose fame will reach the stars.”
Libuše Přemysla’s vision o Prague, Alois Jirásek’s Old Czech Legends
Milada Horáková lost her fecht
but left her country wi love,
and her nation wi honour
they merched her oot
intae dreich midsummer licht
at Pankrác Prison
and tied the noose ticht
aroon her neck
in the war
she had tholed
wi courage
the men o the broken cross
and efter the war
thaim that came
wi the haimmer and the heuk
flytit her and fleyed her
and foond her guilty
juist because she wis brave
juist because they could
and when she spak
at her trial in Prague
aw could see she wis cowped
but staunin yit
awready deid but mair alive
than the hoodies that sat in judgement
and hid their bluid-stained hauns
in the toun whaur Libuše
wance saw greatness,
people, cigarette in mooth,
watched a woman
chok
at the end o a
raip
for thirteen meenits
and at the thirteenth meenit
Milada closed her een for aye
on Libuše’s cauldest daurkest staurs
About this poem
This poem was chosen by Thomas Clark as part of the Scottish Poetry Library’s ‘Champions’ project, a guest curatorship programme to help extend our national reach.
Thomas Clark says, ‘Nae makar has duin mair tae add tae the tonal palette o the Scots language this past twinty years than Matthew Fitt. In his scrievin for bairns, he’s fordert furth a skinklin cosmos o wattergaw neons; but it’s in his poetry aboot the Czech Republic that he’s airtit oot whit ilka language needs atween its black an its white – a range o grays like a mural in grisaille. In his novel But n Ben A-Go-Go, Fitt prophesies a Scotland unner watter, survivors driftin on the surface like debris. An it’s mebbe nae surprise that a writer wirkin in a leid that’s had the last rites read ower it a hunner thoosand times should sae aft prospect a warld après le déluge, an the detritus left efter; an abandoned airfield, an empty kirk, a tongue hauf-thrappled. Ye needna ken onythin aboot the show-trial o Milada Horáková or the strauchles o Libuše tae follae the lang arc o hístory in this poem, frae the foondin myths o Prague tae the sairly real horrors o Stalinist Czechoslovakia. In Scots as stark an spare as the gallows that it leads taewards, Fitt gies us birth, life an deith – a kintrae, ony kintrae, in wan ticht act.’
