We Are Going to Be Shot, Part 2

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "June 1871"

Standing aloof,
     what do our pities mean to them?
What were the privileged to them
     before this time of darkness?

Did we ever protect these women?
Did we take their naked and shivering
     children in, and nourish them?
Has this one any useful skills?
     Does that one even know how to read?

 

From ignorance comes delusion.
Untaught, unloved, uncared for,
what does the cold do to them,
and what did hunger teach them?
Starvation burned the Tuileries.

 

In the name of these damaged souls,
I declare this — I, the man
immune to parades and obligations —
that a dead child moves me more
than the prospect of a defunct palace.

The poor die so easily,
     and this is why.

We find them unfathomable.
They smile, or threaten us
when all is lost to them;
haughty one moment, indifferent
the next, they almost willingly
line up for their executions.

 

We need to think on this.

These blank-eyed damned
we strike down so easily,
show no despair — but why?
Their puny lives have had no joy.

 

The thing we do to the least of us,
may be done to us in turn —
the Golden Rule’s inversion.
Our fates are linked.

 

Brothers, spread happiness below.
Fail to do this, and reap
the cost of woe above. Alas!

Were you such fools to think
the miserable could love their lives?

 

It is all a matter of balance.

True order, and lasting laws,
     a moral sense,
          a charming and virile peace:
all these you will find
     if the poor are content.

 

Just look. The hearts of the suffering
reveal themselves. A sphinx,
remaining masked, displays
its dazzling nudity.
Dark on one side, light on the other —
just probe the inky dark, and, lo!
the blaze of the abyss is clear.

 

To easy it is, the deed complete,
to shudder and look away
as hillocks of dead rise up
among the indifferent willows.
A year from now, who will know?

A slum will be cleared, new
     houses will be offered up.
Once shrouded, the dead are gone.

Are you at ease with this?

The ghosts of enemies
who shrieked to die,
     are bad enough.
To be mocked by the poor
as you shoot them is unbearable.
They will not keep still. We quake
in fear as phantoms take residence
among us. No sleep for us
so long as our victims perish
     with such sinister ease.

 

We Are Going to Be Shot, Part 1

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

 

1

Nothing like Homer, this kind of war
belongs in Tacitus: a victory
ending with a summary massacre.

The victors, satisfied, still have
a nasty temper. I hear some say:
let’s just kill off the lot
     of troublemakers once
     and forever — who needs them?

We need more polite Philintes,
provided they shoot Alceste.

 

It’s done. Death everywhere,
     and not a complaint!
How easily it works.

Some wheat needs reaping
before it ever can grow ripe.

 

O people! Did you think
it would end with your backs
against an awful wall?

It’s all good. The strong wind
is history just sweeps them away.

 

A soldier stands one up
     for the firing-squad,
and the prisoner says,
     “Farewell, my brother.”

 

A woman says, “My man was killed
and nothing matters now.

Was he right? Was he wrong?
We dragged misfortune
chained like two galley-slaves.
Kill him, then kill me too.
If you do it, I am no suicide.”

 

Mounds of the dead
mark every crossroad.
Marched in a black platoon,
twenty singing girls pass by.
The startled crowd wonders
at their grace and innocent calm.
A passerby calls out
to the most beautiful one,
“Oh where, oh where
are they taking you?” —

 

She turns and calmly says, “I think
they plan to shoot us all today.”

 

A mournful noise fills the Lobau barracks,
     as tombs open to receive the dead,
     then close again in rolling thunder.
There, lots of men are finished off
     by the machine-gun’s efficiency.
No one cries out,
as if it had not occurred to them
     that death
comes to each one in a singular way,
that they can hardly wait
to leave behind this sad, and harsh,
and incomplete existence.

Getting it over with seems welcome.

No one flinches. A pale boy
and his bearded grandfather
stand side by side at the wall.
One scoffs at death: the blond
child cries out, laughing: “Fire!”

 

Laughter in the face of death,
     this proud disdain,
is a stark confession. Heed it!

Enigma! This gulf within
     a glacier, baffles
ever the hoariest prophet.
What kind of life have they,
if having it or losing it
is of less care than a dice-roll?

 

Remember the month of May,
when everything alive
wants to touch everything else?

Instinct, soul, the sweetness
inherent in things themselves,
quicken the spirit with joy.

Remember May? Roses
don’t pick themselves.
They need young girls to admire them.
The sunny lawns
      need children frolicking.
Even an old man’s winter
goes soft and melts in sunlight.

 

Remember past months of May,
with perfumed flower-baskets,
bees murmuring, birds up afloat
with ecstasy and spring?
What was wrong with this May?
Instead of thrilling dawn and love
and light and intoxication — what?

 

O terror! It was death everywhere,
the great blind one who knows not May,
implacable, an eyeless shadow.
How will they tremble and cry
beneath the shamed heavens, and sob,
and call in vain for aid
from the city, the nation,
no longer guarded by the Kindly Ones
(the gentle Eumenides
     of civil accord).

 

No one comes now to help
the entirety of France.

We are alone, we who detest
all pell-mell murder
     and groping war.

 

Was it a war you cheered
     and watched happening,
until it happened to you?
Did your eyes tear over,
     and did your arms
rise up in dark salutes of war?
Did you beg for cannons,
rifles and swords and flying bombs?

Did high walls protect you?
Did your fellow citizens rally?

How many days did you flee on foot?
Did anyone help you? Somehow,
that grave had spared you so far,
and now you shudder and scream,
“They are killing us!”

 

Numb now, they are alien
to everything that happened.
They watch as Death comes,
and in his shadow they barely shrug.
Oh, Him again! That’s no surprise.

This specter already
     companioned them,
within each heart
a grave already dug.

 

Death, come and get us!
Our mere existence seems
to have suffocated our betters.
They turned their backs —
what had we done to them?
So now we know
     how little we are worth.
They left us behind to die,
not even deigning a tear.

 

We weep that those in power
     regret nothing.

In their four-chambered hearts,
     one was already reserved
          for torture.

 

At a Barricade

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

 

It was a barricade, abandoned now.
Defenders’ blood, and the blood
of innocent passers-by, ran red
upon the paving-stones.
Along with the suspected Communards,
a twelve-year-old boy is taken.
The sergeant looks down at him and asks,
“Are you part of that crowd
     that held the barricade?” —

 

“I was here for all of it,”
     the boy replies. —

“Too bad, then. That means we have to shoot you.”

 

He’s put apart from the others.
“Just wait. Your turn will come,”
     one hisses in his ear.

 

The soldiers, half-drunk, and cursing all,
line up the prisoners at a nearby wall.
The boy is spun to face and watch
the lightning-flash of the rifles, the groan,
the cry, the fall into a heap of dead
and dying.

 

“Officer — sir?” the boy stammers.

 

“What is it? Don’t worry:
we’ll get to you next.”

 

The lad holds up a gleaming watch
that dangles from a golden chain.
“My father’s watch. I’d like to go
and give it to my mother first.”
The various glances of the men
tells much of their character:

one who would rifle pockets, wants it;
another admired a well-timed lie;
one had a glimmer of conscience.

 

“Is that so,” the sergeant queries.
He put his hand on the trophy.
“For all we know it’s stolen.
And just where is ‘mother’ supposed to be?” —

 

“Right there. Our door, just next
to the fountain. It’s all
she has to remember my father.”

 

The sergeant shakes his head and smiles.
The soldiers mutter crude remarks:
“Just what you’d expect
      in this den of thieves.”
“An imbecile: just shoot him.”
“The city can breathe easy
     with this whole lot gone.” —

 

“I’ll come right back!” the boy promises.
They laugh. Rudely, the officer
pushes the boy away. “Get lost!”

 

The street waif vanishes. They search
for any other stray Communards
among the debris of barricades.
Moans and death-rattles emit
from the heap of bodies.
Faces peer out from open windows,
then dart like frightened bats
back into the watching dark.

Eyes scan the rooftops. The doors
to cellars are torn away.

 

Then something tugs
     at the sergeant’s sleeve.
The boy has returned.
Calmly he strides amid the dead —
a dying hand lifts up, and falls.
He takes his place against the wall,
proud as Viala,
     the Revolution’s boy-hero.
He shouts to the firing-squad:
“Here I am!”

 

The soldiers now turn to stare at him.

Anyone drunk is suddenly sober.

The Angel of Death is stupefied,
ashamed, and stops his work.
No one can breathe; hearts slow,
and pulses dim to a dead-march.

 

Arms lower guns
    as though they weighed a ton,
and the sergeant, stumbling,
steps into the heap of corpses
and takes the boy over and back
to the open pavement. “Go!
Go now! You are pardoned! Go!”

 

2

Child, amid the wild hurricane
of civil war, which, passing
confuses everything, good
and evil, heroes and bandits,
what lifted you on up,
or what within you rose?
How, out of ignorance,
could a sublime soul emerge?

 

A good and brave spirit,
the abyss engulfed you.
One step, toward your mother,
the other, to your death,
were laid out before you,
not destiny, but will.
The young man’s candor
fills the soldier with remorse.
No one will give account
for what he is made to do,
but this child is superb
and valiant, who might
have chosen flight, and life,
sunrises and harmless games,
spring after spring — instead
the spattered wall where all
his friends had met their deaths.

 

If I may wax classical —

O, still so young,
whom Glory bends down to kiss,
sweet friend, you are the kind of youth
the poet Stesichorus would place
defending the gates of Argos.

Stout Cynegyrus
     would call you his brother!
The ephebes of Messene
or Thebes would admit you.
Your name would be engraved there
     on disks of brass.

 

Before that serene and ancient sky
you would walk, a warrior whose steps
would be followed by ardent glances.

 

At the well, beneath the willow’s shade,
a maiden comes, filling the urn
from which the oxen will drink,
but seeing you, she pauses,
your name on her lips until
you have passed well out of sight.

She will point to the vacant space
you occupied, and look, and look.

A Woman Told Me This

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted/translated from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, "June 1871”

 

One who survived the massacres,
     a woman, arrived and told me this:

“I had to run away.
I held my little daughter tight
against my breast as I ran.
She screamed, and I knew her cries
would give away our hide-out.

 

Imagine darting to and fro
with a baby only two months old,
loud as a siren though she
was as weak as a house-fly.

 

I kissed her mouth to quiet her.
And still, she howled.
Even her moans were audible.
She wanted her mother’s breast.
I had no milk to give.

 

A whole night passed like this.
I crouched behind a driveway gate.
I wept. I saw the shining
rifle stocks go back and forth.
I heard my husband’s name
demanded at every kicked-in door.

 

Perhaps I slept a little.
Dawn was near. No sooner
had some expectant rooster
than I tried to raise myself,
the babe still swaddled close.

 

And then I knew. No breath,
the child as stiff as an armful
of kindling. I touched:
my cold hand on a colder brow.

If they killed me right then,
I could care less. One hand
around the dead child, one hand
thrust out the closed-up gate,

and I was on the street. My eyes
must have looked like those
of a lunatic. Some others,
about their own business,
as desperate as mine, perhaps,

in the not-quite-breaking day,

knew me and called my name;
a few reached out
     to give me aid.
I hurtled on. I ran.
The way to the countryside
was open, unguarded.

 

God help me, I don’t remember.
It’s just as if I walked in blindness.
I could never find that spot again
if I tried a thousand times, the place
where I dug with own hands a grave,
among tree-roots a shallow niche,

a hole just big enough to shove her in.
Oh, there was a fence, that’s all
I can bring to mind, a fence
angled behind and around me.

 

I came to my senses. My feet alone
had carried me there. My hands
were black with blood and soil.
A priest came along. He raised me up,
looked down at my inept burial
and stood and wept with me.
Then shots rang out,
close, and then closer still,
and each of us fled
    in opposite directions.
He had never asked my name,
     nor I, his.

Marched to Her Death through the Streets of Paris

 by Brett Rutherford

 

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

 

IX

 

A woman they imprisoned — who knows
her name? — is on the street outside.
Not free, no not at all. They march
her to her execution now. Let’s watch!

 

This promenade of shame
     may take a while.

Her injuries have not yet healed.
She limps along, with who knows what
unsaid confessions on her darkened brow.
Soldiers on either side, and one to push
if she resists — hand-shackles prevent
her lashing out, her feet too lame to run.

She must endure the crowds’ shaking fists.
Their curses seem to roll right off;
beneath her tangled hair, one eye
glares out the way a caged beast regards
tormenters it has grown familiar with.
Her other eye is swollen shut; a bruise
runs down from ear to chin. A witch
she seems, or a surly brute or beast.
All view her through a haze of hate.

 

She is moved about
     like some chessboard pawn,
forward, then turned, and forward again,
for a maximum audience.
A religious procession
     could not be better planned.
What was her crime? What class
of category of offender describe her?
Was there a formal indictment
that listed her offence? Who knows?
Charges fly back and forth amid
the terrible smoke of Paris. Ask her —
has she a clue why she was arrested?

 

They say, “If a man does such-and-such,”
that is a crime, no questions asked.
Is it as blunt as that? Look at an act,
and see the spirit of the thing —
famine, rumors and some bad advice,
a call to arms from the loudest mouth,
some popular bandit so monstrous proud
people love him and do anything he says —
that’s all it takes for some dark agent
to turn and distort a person’s good nature.

 

This swell of violence, once entered on,
this adventure goes one way only,
driven by instinct down an inclined plane,
backed by bad luck’s fatal hurricane,
wrath upon wrath compounding depravity,
hurling itself in fury into civil war,
revealing beneath a well-lit city,
a tangled black forest with no way out.
The Cyclops eye of want and exclusion
provokes a mass howl of envy:
“Others have everything, and I have nothing!”

 

Thinking is dangerous when you sit in rags.
Evil springs up from an empty belly.

You wander why a man becomes terrible,
when he sits at a table that has no bread.
A neighborhood the mice desert
is bound to be a place of wrath.

 

She is made to cross an open square.
Crowds show no mercy as she passes through.
The well-off have their triumph, already
they have enjoyed the thrill of punishment.
Do their tears of joy blind them to her?
Is her bloody silence their kind of victory,
a silence heard all the way out
     to the feasting at Versailles?

 

On every block, the passersby laugh
to see the prisoner stumble by.
A swarm of children chases behind;
their mocking bright cries assault her.
Bubble of bitter spittle line her mouth.
Deaf to their insults, she flinches not.
Various crimes are shouted out,
     a gelid raven-cloud of blame,
fading out only
     when her Gorgon locks pass
     and the corner is turned.

 

Now, in a better neighborhood,
a crowd of women emerge from a park:
nursemaids and courtesans,
schoolgirls and nuns and seamstresses.
They open umbrellas against the sun
and follow along, their eyes
     dark stars of ferocity.
Look! How amusing! Let’s follow!
How close can we get to the execution?

 

A house-door opens — a betrothal party
pours to the sidewalk to see the show.
Look at those diamonds! Who would have thought
there was a war on? A spinster pokes
with her umbrella toward the prisoner’s face.
There! She’s bleeding! Serves her right!

 

I pity the wretch; I condemn the crowds.
I recoil in horror at this day-lit Paris,
as she-dogs come slathering forth
to bite and maim a wild she-wolf.

 

Their laughter is worse
     than her firing squad.

 

The Arsonist

 

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1870”

One strides before me with a flaming brand.
I call him back. He turns and faces me. I ask,
“Are you the one who just burned down
     the library of the Louvre?”
He wipes his brow, puts down the torch,
extends a fraternal hand toward me.
“Yes, sir,” he says. “That fire you see,
was nearly all my work.” My hand
does all it can to not become a fist.

“But that’s a crime!” I shout. “Incredible!
A crime against yourself, an infamy.
In that black smoke, the ray of your soul
has been extinguished. The very torch
you held so proudly up is canceled
by the horror of what you have done.
What have you burned in this mad rage?
Your property! Your honor! Your dowry!
The whole of your inheritance!”

He would race on; I stop him.
Hands on his shoulders, man-to-man,
I must, I must, I must
     get through to him somehow.

He waits me out, he knows enough
to understand respect
for a distraught old poet, at least.
So I do my best to explain.

“Some of those books
were your masters’ worst enemies.
They worked to your advantage.
The book has always taken up your cause.
What is a library but an act of faith
that darker times invest against the coming sun?
By telling the truth, they bear witness for us.

“What seems to you a tomb to desecrate,
is a living repertory, a mass of truths,
out down in masterpieces so fine
that lightning and clarity spark out from them.
Out of the centuries the speak; they tell
of ancient men, in histories that spell
a warning to the future. And in the poets,
thoughts that first came and never ceased
to echo, live on and on. Bibles die here,
lost in the abyss with a thousand authors,
Homers and Aeschyluses, Shakespeares and Jobs,
far off the upper-shelf horizon; they led the way
to Molière, Voltaire and Kant.
Into Reason itself you cast your wretched,
flaming torch, the human spirit up in smoke!

“Books liberate men. Have you forgotten this?
One book can stand above the human fray.
It glows with its own light. Because it shines
its pure white beam of reason, the scaffolds
fall, wars stop, and famine is averted.
A book well-read ends slavery, calls home
the outcasts whom ignorance banished.

“Just open a book. Plato, Milton, Beccaria.
Prophetic texts! Dante, or Shakespeare, or Corneille;
the great soul that dwells within them
awakens in you. Dazzled, you feel transformed.
You tread their steps and think their thoughts,
as though you had been, all along, one person.
Reading makes you serious, thoughtful, and kind.

“You are quite young. Perhaps you doubt ideas
can leap from a page into your own being.
The great men past await your company,
the same way dawn gold-lights a cloister.
Ideas plunge deep into your understanding.
Their warm rays soothe and quicken you.
Your hesitating soul gains confidence.

“At last you recognize yourself as good,
and capable of better — old prides and furies,
evils and prejudices, even the obeisance
you once gave to kings and emperors
melt off like snow at the start of spring,
all because knowing pushes fear aside.

“Then freedom comes.
     Yours were this light and glory,
yours between those walls of stone,
and it’s you who have blacked them out!
All that you dreamt of ever being —
some book in there could show the way.
Books read and thought about
     sever the Gordian knots
that error and truth were tangled in.
Doctor, guide, and guardian, a book!
One would have healed your hatred,
     another your madness —
Not yours! Not now! And it is all your fault!

The book is your wealth. Where but from here
do knowledge, law, truth, virtue, and duty,
progress, and reason, dispel delirium?
How could you have done this? Answer me!”

This is, in so many words,
     what I try to tell him.
The Arsonist regards me. He looks
half-mad, half-god. My words
have stunned him. As eye to eye
he keeps my gaze, he answers:

“No one ever taught me
     how to read.”

I Have No Anger

by Brett Rutherford

After Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

 

I have no anger, and that surprises you.
Your tiny cough is supposed to sound
like thunder. You growl, and puff away
to make your pale lantern flare, and I
am supposed to feel lightning at my heels.

For all the trouble you take
     to get my attention,
I scarcely notice you’re there.

You, self-styled villain, you sense
there is something in me that forgives you,
and that is like a slap to your face.
In fact, you are already punished
     for the mere act of wanting
          so much to hurt another.

It’s pitiful. Worse yet,
     when in a gang you plot
another’s downfall,
     and attempt to achieve it,
even the honor of a kick is denied you.
That hurts:
     the insignificance of hatred.
Not even a slap in the face in return
for all that plotting — imagine that!

Sometimes the outcast falls, and still
does not acknowledge what was done,
or by whose conniving he was attacked.
He acts as though nothing has happened.

And if the thinker appears to be disturbed,
it is not about you. He has the business
of the universe on this mind, you know.

Will I be irritated, then?
     I doubt I even know
the names of the ones attacking me.

We pensive outcasts
     may seem uncultured.
Before we get angry
     on hearing an insult,
we stop to look down
     at what is beneath us:

down there, among the ants,
     that buzzing sound,
a blur of eye-stalks and tentacles,
tiny, segmented minions
     with a hundred legs.
These are the ones
who have declared war on us,
a centipede conspiracy!

 

 

 

In Good Company (A Letter)

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "June 1871"

Dear lady,
     I say that what I did was good.
And I was punished for it.
That seems to be the order of things.
You, who were so valiant,
     calm and charming,
in the terrible siege and the grim ordeal,
braving this hideous war
     and the hurricane of crime
          that followed it,
beauteous soul
     that heaven made sister
of another lofty soul, my friend,
wife of that proud and gentle thinker
     whose guest I was;
you, who always knew when to give
     support, and how,
you should see what has happened to me!

 

To name a few events:
You saw me return to France,
     almost an apotheosis,
now you see me chased away, reviled.
From that to this, and in less than a year.
Things change so suddenly,
     and for the worse.
Rome, Athens, and Zion endured such times.
Paris has the same right to save itself.
In other places, they have lacked the nerve.
Which ones? No matter. Spare Montague,
and Capulet calls it a crime. Yet Capulet,
given the stronger place, abuses it.

In the same kind of war of factions,
I am now an old buzzard, a criminal.

So be it. Today they insult me, the very
ones who cheered me on a year ago.

Maybe the purpose
     of my late-in-life acclaim,
was to be toppled and taught a lesson.
Not much of a triumph, eh? Does one
in its flimsiness warrant the other’s cruelty?

Madame, I think I have a heart like yours,
the same as those around you, whose minds
sustained by one another, are never dark.
Does the robe of the old outcast fit me best?
Can you bear again to see me this way?
Defending the people, and fighting off
the priests: I would do it again.
Isn’t the abyss a beautiful place to be,
considering the good company?
I am down here with Barbes and Garibaldi,
and I think you like me better since my fall.

So This Is Exile

 by Brett Rutherford

 

     After Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “June 1871”

 

V

The narrow path is not an easy one.
Ah! Just try it for a while. It takes
a special daring to prove the crowd wrong,
to be upright in one’s own soul
     and stay that way,
to guard the universal sense of right
when all around you trample and bruise it.

When one who tries this is declared “outlaw,”
the outlaw is rewarded with as much
of this thing called exile that the law allows.
You do not exile just anyone you please.
Not house-arrest and not imprisonment,
this punishment is inexpressible,
a terrible and almost holy thing.

 

How many will come and stare
at the front door of your remembered home?
How many, from afar, will squint and scan
the eaves of your old roof, and ask, “Where is he?”
Will there even be an acceptable
reply, that is not a lie, or an evasion?
Imagine him in some desert place, alone,
or crowded in where every step is watched
and no one is allowed to say his name?
What’s on his mind, in a place
where his native tongue is seldom spoken?
The flower he picked with a childish hand?
A dark street corner that one furtive glance
imbued with a spell that would never quite fade?
Old times and lessons learned in school?
Old dawns, fields that were greener then
with far more sonorous birds?
A certain blend of sky and cloud
that curtained one place, and no other?
To learn, by hear-say only
of those who died in his absence,
their bedside unattended, tombs
he would never see as moss
and vines erase familiar names.
This is exile.

 

Exile is a water-torture, infamous,
a timid executioner’s delight,
pangs to the heart
as granite of duty,
rings with the falling drops
and erodes away.

 

Exile is a compound-interest penalty
inflicted on the innocent and just,
so under Tarquin, or Augustus Caesar,
or Bonaparte, condemned men die
because they are innocent and just.

 

Exile, a place of shadow and longing,
is a dimly-seen mist, an expanding silence
made up of stolen glimpses,
     snatches of song and bird-call,
a dark wood glimpsed, a reef
that is there one day and gone the next,
     a breath, a sourceless sound,
all closing in upon a pensive brow.
Oh!  Tell him his homeland still exists!
(This being true is the most terrible fact of all.)

 

By an invisible thread our homeland holds us,
     the one thing which, once lost,
retains its charm for us forever.
The fields of one place only
     seem to belong to us,
its trees not shaped like any others,
     its riverbanks, its lowering sky —
this place alone brings back our steps.

 

Homeless, we shall forever wander,
and if some foreign king should banish us,
     we slough it off,
for banishment is not an exile.

Exile is a form of death,
     taken in slices of clock and calendar,
some letters unsent,
     and many more undelivered.
Alive at his desk with pen in hand,
his words must issue forth so fast
the censors cannot catch and cancel them.

Each exile, unique and solitary,
is given a chance for immortal glory.
As for the kings and tyrants,
full half or more of them are dust,
names scarcely recalled
in the cavalcade of idiots.