To Cross the Sea

by Brett Rutherford

I should move to England,
if only to perish there,
in or not far from
some ancestral spot.
I have claim
to William the Conqueror's
land-grant, a ruined
castle or two, a manor
baronial, farmsteads
abandoned to birds
and nettles, a burial ground
with Roman and Druid bones
somewhere beneath.

I should, really,
for the British believe,
in their heart of hearts,
in ghosts. That means
I may persist
in pestering others
with whispered poems
for ages to come,

where here,
on the lunatic side
of the Atlantic, a poet,
dead, winds up
in a dead-tire heap
or land-fill, fame being
the time it takes
for a pot to boil dry.

Down at the Docks

In Greek legend, Galatea is a sea-nymph who loves a mortal boy named Acis. The monster Cyclops named Polyphemus loves Galatea and kills the boy. Galatea runs away and rejoins the sea nymphs.

Here is my modern retelling of the story:

DOWN AT THE DOCKS

by Brett Rutherford

One-eyed Paulie had this Gal, you see.
Gal was all they called her.
Oh, he had his eye on her.
She had both eyes on Acey,
who, having a preference
for the sailors,
wouldn’t even glance her way.

It was sad to watch it happen.
Paulie made his eye-patch wet
with weeping — Gal moped away,
pale as dried cod — Acey
missed out on all the flirting
that other guys would swoon for,
’cause he was buyin’ drinks
for all the Merchant Marine.

It reached a head one night
when Paulie caught Acey
behind The Gold Talon,
and skewered him good
with an old harpoon.
All things considered,
cops looked the other way,
Acey being, you know,
what was he doing there,
anyway, up to no good?

Then Paulie found Gal
just walkin’ the pier,
and as he tells it, “Look,
I just grabbed her.
I couldn’t help myself.”

She slid away from him
as smooth as an eel.
Fell in, she did, and sank.
They dived, they looked.
No sign of her.

Down at the docks, you need
to stay clear of one-eyed Paulie.
All he can think about is Gal,
and all he says is that
she’s off with the mermaids,
not dead at all, not dead,
not that. He moans,
“All I did was to grab her.
I couldn’t help myself.”

Wanderer's Song

by Brett Rutherford

I am my own shepherd. I do not want.
The neighbor whose pasture I slept in last night
does not mind: the fence is not for people.
Nuts fall from the trees, and apples, too.
Between two warring towns I freely walk.
In my simple ways I cannot distinguish
a friend from a foe. Three towers ring out
in clashing chorales of discordant bells.
Crowds waving books bound in the skins of lambs,
shout curses at one another. They look at maps,
draw angry lines to define a border,
and melt down their ploughshares to make a gun,
that will lift a whole village and drop it
again, consuming all in smithereens of rage.

Among such lunatics, it is not wise
to linger. Now, back to the hills for me!
Yet Nature has its hazards if you look.
Still waters breed mosquitoes, and wolves watch
to see who tarries there too long, and, lame,
would never outrun them to the forest brake.

My modest hut beneath a hanging rock
is serenaded by a pebbled creek,
and the bats, my silent brethren, swoop down
to tell the secrets of the coming dawn.

There is a valley where no one goes,
except, they do say, the dead and the mad.
Free-thinkers go there. Sometimes, among them,
we think we are the only ones who truly live.
We shake our heads at the cannons’ thunder;
and over the ridge, the exultant bugle
preludes the mutual cries of sudden death.
Some take a life, some give a life, for what?

We hold only the weapon of reason,
yet they would rather die than take it up.
Tempting it is to stay here always.
With brotherhood and peace
     my cup runs over.

 

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 5

by Brett Rutherford

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

5.

Imagine there’s an ocean
     with infinite depths

into which all troubles, cast,

close the book of destiny —
done, gone, and disappeared.

Let the ever-renewing waves
sweep clean the shore.

The tide keeps folding over
whoever is thrown into it.
Sea-maws open for new victims,
two hungry flaps for doors.

 

Hurl in the criminals!
If the innocent go, too,
punished in the confusion,
so what? It’s over now!

Judges rebuke historians
with gavels raised:
“Now, let’s not dwell on the past.”

 

To men of ice who never thaw,
always on the sharp edge
     of justice, impartial
to the to point of punishing all,
it is a matter or triage:
to cure a wound, cut off the limb.

 

Convenient it is,
to sentence men en masse.

New-minted justice
     could be order’s foundation,
but no! like fish thrown back
unwanted come to the net again,
those spared one horror
     have another in store,
their tick-marked names
up on one list and down
     on another.
All are cast into the same abyss.

 

Irrelevant: the facts, the doubts,

     the losses we all suffered
      together as a people,
the moil of the reckless men
and the brothers and women
     who followed them;
the child who took up
     the paving stones
or mocked the soldiers
      in lewd gesturing’

the crime of merely being
in a place where crimes occurred.

 

Instead we are told to believe
that everything was saved,
ills, tears, and turbulence,
not cut by a scythe, but swept
aside as though a broom

God wielded would sweep them all,
     storm-drain to sewer,
          and river to sea.
Look! The city! Open for business!

 

Smugly, you ask me to approve of this.
     What can I say? You are wrong.
The screams still echo.
The fear is palpable. The blood,
     the charnel pits, the grapeshot,
the sea so sick of justice
     it would vomit back your dead!

 

Since I stand here blaming you,
     next it is all my fault,

because I have something inside,
     that ticks and beats, and which
     you seem to be lacking.

How many more times
can lightning strike
     the blind and poor?

 

I shudder. Not to mention
the future harvest of revenges
your every action sows.

“Working for the best,” your
outcome is the worst possible.
If this in a state is wisdom,
     how does it differ
         from dementia?

 

That which flows out,
     tides back anew
with the force of the moon
     behind it.
Suffering and Hatred are sisters.

In darkness, one assumes
     the raiment of the other.

 

Now, even if I, whose guilt
    might be called a naïve innocence,
might return to that austere absence,
to the harsh and dreary isolation
    from which these last twelve months
    seemed as white as dawn,
even if some shadow, inexorable,
     called me back to my high cliff —
wretches without hope, you have
     one friend in me,
          and I will not be quiet!

 

People, you have the night
    and me, as your witnesses.
The law is dead. Hope has fallen.
Let it not see said that France
     fell into a total eclipse,
and no one said a word of protest.

I am calamity’s best friend.

 

To those who have been damned, I saw:
In Hell I walk beside you. I want to be —
to take this part, the best, to stand
beside the one who has never done evil
and whose cry will not be heard.

Your leaders led you astray; and I,
     at least, have told you history.

 

What poet would not prefer
     a golden victory?
Now I must take the part of the fallen.
My solitary march is not
     toward the flag of victory,
but somewhere off
     where the shrouds are gathered.

 

I open the grave of the common man.
And now your jeering rains upon me,
the shrieking of prostituted souls,
sarcasms paid for by the line,
gratuitous lies, the likes
of which Nonette and Maupertuis
tormented Voltaire,
     the same raised fists
which chased Rousseau away,
cries blacker than the winds
    of some Libyan sirocco,
more vile than that whip
     with leather straps
they used to scourge, in flight,
     the coffin of Molière,
the idiotic irony
     of your fierce anathemas,
the ring of dried saliva
     around the mouths
which had only yesterday spat
on the pale Christ’s forehead,
you flying stones
    eternally thrown at all
         who have been proscribed,
keep at it, fiends!

 

Outrages as yet unheard of,
     I welcome you.

I wear your insults as a badge.
The higher the affront
     against the people,
     the higher the glory.

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 4

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

4

To deny me the right to be,
     is to kill me.
To deny me the right to do good,
     you hack my limbs
     and make me useless.

Am I nothing but a head that screams?
Unheard amid an infamous storm,
I crash at random
where bitter foam and wave collide.

 

To say I have no right to France,
     my Mother? How can this be?
I have my uses, you know.
Can I not probe, O victors,
into the dark social well
that gapes at your hearts’ bottom?

Have I no knack
     of discerning evil,
     of finding remedies,
of looking everywhere
for an Archimedes lever
that would bring us back to peace?

 

Someone must forge the key
to the new times coming. Poets
devoid of credit and bank accounts,
might seem to have something to offer.

We have fought much;
     sometimes we have worked together.
Proud social trials
     have come to naught;
some vaunted efforts
     have shown success.
We struggled together.

 

Why turn your thinkers,
doctors and guides,
your philosophical elder
brothers, into a pile
of shipwrecked wretches,
gasping on an unknown shore?

 

Are we unclear and mysterious?

Will banning our books suffice
to silence all enigmas?
Will the Sphinx do penance
and genuflect to Christ?

The deeds of old men, the spite
of thwarted children, rule the day.
What a future, statesmen!
Philosophers, oh, what a dream!

 

It comes down to policy:
expel enough people,
and everything will be fine.

Enough of grievances,
     catastrophes,
anguish and convulsion!

Just go back home and shout:
“I am a minister
     and everything is fine.
Don’t look at that sinister horizon.
Ignore those heavy, haggard clouds,
red blood-bloated specters floating there
are angels misperceived. All’s right.

That is not hell-fire there. It’s dawn.”

 

This vessel has death for a pilot.
It is the Raft of the Medusa.

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 3

by Brett Rutherford

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

3

So those you did not kill,
     you are happy to be “rid of?”
What if they get rid of themselves?

So what if ones says,
     “Oh, very well,
          I am going abroad.”
It is a lie. Life, hollowed out,
expressionless faces drained
of their proper emotion.
Self-exile is a little death.
Flight, looking over one’s shoulder,
is not a vacation. The earth
itself seems to have cast one out;
a world, no longer round,
seems just a forest without paths.

Nameless, I fear
     I will become transparent.
Ashes descend upon my hair,
     my eyes, my fingernails
are smashed and soiled. I pass
from place to place, where signs
are in an unknown language.

Does anyone think of me?

An abyss of non-being
     opens to swallow me.

No more in the night do I hear
the turnings and sighs
of those who slept close to me.
It is all wolves and ravens here.
I am forgotten in the night forever.

 

There is a dream in which
you play yourself, but when you wake
from it you are no longer sure
of your present existence.

Back home, more lies are told
about thousands of innocent people,
who are too stunned
     to defend themselves.
You are not there to help.

Beneath that sky, in the sun
that warmed my homeland better
than anywhere else,
     I am no longer a citizen.

My home, the field I labored in,
my industry, my wife, my children —
show me the clear light
     in which they still exist!

 

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 2

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

2

And what of those condemned
to the prison transports I have written of,
dying at sea in those smothering
between-decks, borne down
by the enormity of the fleeing ship?

They cannot stand. They reel
as the floor tips at insane angles.
They eat with their fingers
     from a common tub,
drink one after another
     from a rusty can.

They roast, they freeze.

 

A howling hurricane
     torments their dungeon.
The water roars, and should one catch
a glimpse into the sky above,
there is nothing there but a cannon
extending its neck in silhouette
into the storm’s black eye.

 

Have pity if they die,
at latitude and longitude unknown,
for should they land
at the place of their intended
banishment, what then?

 

Thinking of them, I swoon
in despair and mourning.
It suffocates the self to bear
so much concern, and for so many.
If we knew their actual number,
it would numb the soul.

 

No one is bad, I tell myself,
yet how much evil our hands accomplish!

 

There is a registered list somewhere
of those who shiver on the sobbing sea,
whom even the weeping sky pities —

O land of brutal exile! —
O, to be dashed instead
     against unyielding rocks!

One man — is it you, or me? —
is thrown there, sad and worried,
     trembling and naked,
a random figure
     among a howling crowd.
Mists! Storms! Wave upon wave,
smash upon smash until no breath
remains that is not salt and spume.
Eyes in a gray mist unable to know
what is near, and what far away
in an empty, gray, falling tide.

 

One lives! He stands upright!
He has made it through Hell’s ocean.

Sands slide tormentingly;
a distant sun throbs. Sea birds
call out in no known language,
their welcome? Their mockery?

 

This is the exile’s dawn.
What if no one comes?
What if no one helps?

What if all that one owns
is the broken thread of love?

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 1

by Brett Rutherford

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

1

Fear not, I am with you.
Perhaps I am perverse,
but I am drawn
to poor souls overwhelmed,
to those whom lightning strikes,
then strikes again.

I feel a bond of brotherhood.
You — even if I fought and won
some struggle against you —
the misery of one defeated brings
darkness upon us all.

A somber joy enlightens me.

Insults that once pelted me,
I wish now to forget.

Do sparrows and doves,
alert and about the business of peace
recall what hated names you hurled?
They fell like harmless pebbles.

Have you and I the luxury
of mutual hatred,
when they are all happy?

Are who are “they?”
The ones you could not bring
yourself to speak of: the people.

How many weeks or months have passed
since men have seen a pay-check?
It is they, the sad families,
men, woman and children,
their rights, their future,
that I defend.

I stand with the led-astray,
the weak, and this very crowd,
which, never having had
a ladder to ascend,
collapses in madness
under dark events.
Dwelling in ignorance, their air
is only inclement weather.

Alas! How many times must I
repeat the lesson I have for you?
It was up to you, the fortunate,
to lead them, to yield to them
their share of the city’s bounty.
Your faulty vision blinded them;
abused by us,
as by a miserly guardian,
the harvest reaped and hurled at us
is Wrath. The harms
they now inflict on all
is a cornucopia of hatred.

A little brotherhood
would have gone a long way.
Who guided them? Who took
their hands and taught them
to shun the shadows and walk
where the true light glimmers?

No one! We left them lost
in a labyrinth until
they came out all Minotaurs.

To be sure, they terrify you now,
in their eyes no glint
of fraternity.

Did you count on their “inherent goodness?”
Their shadowed souls fed on emptiness.
They stumbled about in search of light,
encountering various monsters
as they went,
in a fog so thick and dreary
their thoughts got tangled up
as in a brambled wood.
Adrift, they saw no lighthouse,
as currents incomprehensible
hurled them on rocks of misery.

Spun ’round and ’round
they staggered, dizzy-drunk,
stunned just like Ixion
chained to his fiery wheel,
blamed for misfortune as though
it were some primal sin of their own.

This being their plight,
I so resolved to ask
that bread and the light
of truth and learning
be given freely to all.

Or did you imagine that when
the black cannon of Vendémiaire
fired off its last charge in June,
that when the smoke cleared,
revealing the rubble of May’s
bombings, that all would be well,
since everyone in sight was dead?

What? One rooster crows,
and all past wounds should vanish?

If I were asked to help the people,
to solve their problems —
then first things first. I lean to them,
and tell them that I love them.
(Is that so difficult a thing?
The quandary may be
I mean it, and you do not.)

Everything else flows from this
one simple declaration. Yes,
I am with and of the people.
I am fiercely obstinate
about my gentleness
toward the vanquished.
Again and again I tell you,
“No! No reprisals!”

Perhaps I have grown soft with age,
but when a man weeps and sobs,
my heart grows pensive; the sight
of mothers with children in their arms,
melts me away. When I think
that they killed some old, fat lady,
harmless to anyone, whose hands
we saw reach out from a pit of corpses —
O pity! To think of all those
you still intend to do away with!

Ghosts without epitaphs
tug at our sleeves and cry,
“I was proscribed!” —
“I was a martyr!” —
“No one even told me
why it was they shot me!” —

Let this not be our table-talk
in the midst of mourning
already terrible. Let sorrows
pass through us as through a sieve;
let the wind winnow them
as they go to whatever shadow
the deep sky reserves for them.
Do the hands of the dying
reach up to tell us something? Or not?

Books Published in 2024, So Far

In spite of election horrors, The Poet's Press has published 18 new, expanded or revised books so far this year, including new versions of our books in PDF and epub/Kindle editions. The year so far:

Emilie Glen. The Writings of Emilie Glen 3: Poems from Magazines. Second expanded edition. 310 pages. Paperback, 6 x 9 inches.

Brett Rutherford. September Sarabande. Paperback, 6 x 9 inches, 490 pages.

Brett Rutherford. September Sarabande. PDF e-book. 490 pages.

Brett Rutherford. From Hecla to Jacob's Creek. EPUB and Kindle e-book.

Denise LaNeve. Half-Lives of the Radium Girls. Paperback, 6 x 9 inches, 112 pages.

Denise LaNeve. Half-Lives of the Radium Girls. EPUB and Kindle Ebook.

Mikhail Artsybashev and Leonid Andreyev. Two Russian Exiles: Selected Fiction. Edited/adapted and introduced by Brett Rutherford. Revised and corrected edition. Paperback, 6 x 9 inches, 266 pages.

Mikhail Artsybashev and Leonid Andreyev. Two Russian Exiles: Selected Fiction. Edited/adapted and introduced by Brett Rutherford. Revised and corrected edition. EPUB edition.

J. Rutherford Moss. The Hand You're Dealt. Kindle epub edition.

Suzanne Gili Post. Venus of Malta. Kindle epub edition.

Brett Rutherford. An Expectation of Presences. EPUB Kindle edition.

Brett Rutherford. Midnight on Benefit Street. Poetry, fiction, and journal entries for 2012-2014. Paperback, 6 x 9 inches, 276 pages.

Brett Rutherford. Midnight on Benefit Street. Poetry, fiction, and journal entries for 2012-2014. PDF ebook, 276 pages.

Li Yu. Emperor Li Yu, A Life in Poems. Poem cycle by Brett Rutherford, adapted and expanded from poems by Li Yu. 6 x 9 inches, paperback, 174 pages. Illustrated with 24 paintings from the Tang and Song Dynasties. [Previously issued only in hardcover.]

Michael Frachioni. Bus Poems. Paperback, 6 x 9 inches, 128 pages.

Callimachus. Callimachus in Alexandria: A Poem Cycle. A poem cycle by Brett Rutherford, adapted and expanded from poems by Callimachus. Second, expanded edition. 100 pages, paperback.

Callimachus. Callimachus in Alexandria: A Poem Cycle. A poem cycle by Brett Rutherford, adapted and expanded from poems by Callimachus. Second, expanded edition. 100 pages, PDF ebook.

Callimachus. Callimachus in Alexandria: A Poem Cycle. A poem cycle by Brett Rutherford, adapted and expanded from poems by Callimachus. Second, expanded edition. Kindle epub edition.

On Collective Stupidity

There seems to be social pressure not to call people "stupid." Let me try to lay out circumstances in which the label applies. Some individual voters made decisions to vote for a senile, amoral, criminal, climate-denying fool. I see such persons every day, and some are surprisingly well-educated, but on certain issues they seem to have lost all ability to evaluate facts and anticipate outcomes. Some have been swayed by a half-century of hate propaganda portraying liberals as Communists. Some have a single-issue on which they vote, not caring about the consequences on any other issue -- this single issue might be abortion, or it might be the belief that the president has direct control over inflation and gas prices, or it may be a single-minded obsession with one's investment portfolio. For yet others, the single issue is fear of the "other," whether it is pet-eating Haitians or the horror of not knowing the biological sex of the person in the next seat.

Each individual vote is the best that one can do, given their limited knowledge, their prejudices, and their fears. I know people with PhDs who voted for Jill Stein, and nothing could persuade them that their vote was thrown away -- they revel in the purity of their choice.
Where "stupid" comes in is in the aggregate. The result of all these individual actions is collective stupidity. The looming climate disaster was barely mentioned in the campaigns. It is collective stupidity to elect climate-denying, corrupt fools at this moment in history, just as it is corporate stupidity to focus on quarter-to-quarter profits when the burning of fossil fuels threatens to literally end the ability of humans to live at all.

For a big chunk of my life, I was a libertarian. Which, I finally realized, was a devotion to a silly utopian ideal in which productive geniuses would lead the way with enlightened self-interest. Burning up the planet you live on is not enlightened self-interest. Neither is selling products that kill people. There is no time now for the playing out of strong-man, fascist fantasies, or any other utopian scheme that is based on hatred of those who hold one set of ideals against those who hold another. (Fighting over pie while you are in the oven). Hands at each others' throats, they fail to see that the hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, heat waves, droughts, and superstorms are indifferent to politics.

 
Only the greatest collaborative scientific and engineering effort will save the human species from the climate catastrophe. Everything else is a distraction. And yes, the word "stupid" applies, especially since we cannot wait ten or twenty years for the politics to swing round from fascist to liberal.

Bottom line: even "educated" people do stupid things, and when they do them en masse, we are collectively stupid.

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.

 

Too 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.