Night on the Heath

What stalked through the Post Office?

The weather’s foul again, ripping through the unnameable archipelago. And here am I, fumbling with truth, longing to unbutton, like Vladimir Holan, that time he drank Hamlet under the table, while history went falsely drawn past his window like the Vlatava river in flood. Who am I? Wandering the night, buttonholing ghosts, demanding to know what is the State without love? Living death. Cases alter circumstances. But power’s no ghost, as Hamlet learnt, struggling between past and present, old and new, the lot of all poets. How losers outnumber victors – just as the dead form the majority. Tell me what that might mean for democracy? A promotion for historians? A lifeline for gravediggers. It’s not so much who comes out on top as how. When at last I found him he said, ‘Whenever they tell me it’s all about family, I laugh. Life’s not short enough for that to hold its ground. Ask Hamlet and he came nowhere close at about the age of Christ.’

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