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Milada

Matthew Fitt

„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


Matthew Fitt

Tags:

vision

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.’

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Matthew Fittb.1968

Matthew Fitt is a poet and educator, working in the field of Scots language education.
More about Matthew Fitt

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