The Inhuman Wave

by Brett Rutherford

Those not Frenchmen, who found themselves
in Paris during the Terror, or the Commune’s tumult,
have told of them, the unnumbered multitude,
for every jeune fille a femme terrible,
how they welled out of the slums and docksides
ten thousand strong with knives and hooks,
marched all the way to Versailles to rip
and shred the silk bedding of Marie Antoinette;
how with scarcely-human, distorted visages
they howled with joy as nuns and priests
were dragged to the chugging Guillotine;
how they bore the piked heads of nobles
from square to square while shriek-singing
enfants de la Patrie (enfants indeed
as the starving fishwives and worn-out
ladies of the after-hours avenged their rapes,
revenged miscarriages and hunger’s stillbirths,
shook fists in the names of starved-to-death
children, of menfolk vanished to dungeons).

Those horrified witnesses to ’93,
or to the doomed Commune of commons’ rage,
said they had never seen such creatures,
contorted rag-faces that scarce were seen
in daylight, demons even from Goya’s fever,
Maenads in ’71 who hurled incendiary bombs,
Medusas of the Communards reducing the Tuileries
to an ash-ground of burnt and crumbled ruins
(damn their palaces! to the flames, their documents!) —
and how in each time of revolt, indeed,
illiterate and with no scrap of paper on them,
many a hag could issue detailed death-lists
of accumulated resentment, this way, milord,
to the alley where you will be torn to bits.
Women whose work it was to skin and scale
the Seine boats’ harvest, who throttled hens,
gutted the hares and trimmed the venison —
how easily they came to blood and rending!

“Where did they all come from? One never saw
such faces! A physiognomy of anger, creatures
so hideous and filthy one could not think
they dwelt with fathers, lovers and children;
rather, they were demons of political rage,
as though every wronged, dead harridan
rose from her Black Death catacomb undead.”
Mères-grand, Citoyennes, Dames de la Mort!
Beware, kings and tyrants, the women of Paris!