Amit Majmudar
Prologue to an Unwritten Rewrite of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
Our votes are votive, candles lit before
A bombed cathedral’s lonely, standing door,
No roof above it, and no pews behind,
Alive, aloft, but only in the mind,
Its mass of stone as ethereal as Mass,
As God, who colors all, the stain in glass.
Our faith was Liberty, the civic Goddess.
How quickly we’ve forgotten what she taught us,
Chapter and verse, the Pledge, the Constitution.
Our people—fickle, fissile—race to dissolution.
Our late Republic’s sole phylactery,
The ballot box, we stuff with TNT.
Silenced, the sacred music of the anthem.
Fertility and faith decline in tandem:
We are not who or what we used to be,
The atom-splitters, sheriffs of the sea,
The moonshot multitudes that Whitman wrote of....
Not that we never had a profit motive;
And NATO cannot paper over the mass grave
The North Atlantic used to be for black slaves.
Our greatness was so mingled with our evil,
Was it God who blessed us or the devil?
About our play this evening—it concerns
A Roman veteran whose country turns
On him. He runs for office, but he can’t
Lower himself to do the song and dance,
The public lies and private deals with factions
That got out the vote and swung elections back then,
Same as they do today. Disgusted with
The process, with the democratic myth,
He shakes with grand Shakespearean emotions,
Stalks off to join the just-defeated Volscians,
And leads a foreign army into Rome.
His second homecoming wrecks his own home.
Now I do not intend some double entendre
With our time; I’m not some coy Cassandra.
I’m just a hack who’s touching up a drama—
Delete that metaphor, insert that comma—
The standard modernizing of a play
That people rarely read or stage today.
And yet the play does deign to entertain us:
In this, it panders, unlike Coriolanus.
Citizens, please forgive me if you’re bored;
The duller bits are me, the best, the Bard....
Amit Majmudar’s forthcoming book is The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, November 2024). More information about his novels and poetry collections can be found at www.amitmajmudar.com.