I, City

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If you stop at the corner of two streets — there among the small houses you might know as Na Špačkárně, in the quarter of the city irreversibly called Stalingradská (at least that’s what people still call it, for there is no greater paradox of history than calling the small by great names) — you will encounter two memorials to the victims of the miners’ strikes of Most.

The strikes numbered two, during them eight people were shot. One strike was in 1920, the second and more famous one in the Year of Our Lord 1932. I am not a poet, I am a city, ill equipped to write about the affairs of people. I am a city, a new city. I cannot bear witness to the past, I can describe only what I see.

And here, among the full-grown, needle-leaved shrubs, I see a stone.

And on the stone:

THIS & THAT, FROM HERE & THERE, AGE, MINER

THIS & THAT, FROM HERE & THERE, AGE,

MASTER SHOEMAKER

One sunny day in June, a twenty-six-year-old poet born in Old Most brought his friend Pedro from Lisbon to the memorial.

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