The Struggle

 by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “March 1871”

All around me, alas, the anger of ignorance.
Hard as it is, we must pity those
beyond the reach of truth’s great radiance.
Besides, my friend, what does it matter.
     Honor is on our side.
Yes, let us pity those, who while insulting us
with jeers, hasten to soil themselves, and kneel
before the horrible peace that strangles France.
The brooms of your disdain, and mine, shall sweep
their idiotic ingratitude aside. History, when it
is written, shall only remember them as jots,
ellipses, initials undecipherable.
They would drive Jesus hither and yon
like a homeless gypsy; Saint Paul would seem to them
a hideous Democrat with dangerous ideals.
They would even say of Socrates,
     “What a terrible jester this one is.”

Their darkened, myopic eye is afraid of dawn.
Is it the people’s fault? No. In Naples, in Rome,
here, always, and everywhere,
it is quite easy for simple folk
to dart envious eyes at the soldiers
(because they suffered the honor of losing?),
or to mutter curses at mitered priests
(because their impotent prayers failed?)
and envy just as quickly transmutes to hate.
The icicles I watched this winter,
passing our river docks pell-mell,
throwing such a dark cold, but just as soon
they fled and melted quickly in the shadows.
The inhuman stabs of these icy blades
like human hate and vanity, here and gone.

I think of those who once, like divine fighters,
came alone to the gates of a city,
without an army to be its deliverance,
and of how the flood of vile clamors
     rolled over them unfelt.
What is the use of all this? Come, let us join hands.
And I, the old Frenchman, and you, the ancient Roman,
let us venture out together. There is no umbrella
against contumely, and we need not dress
for the occasion of our condemnation.

We shall find it a sad place;
we shall be made uncomfortable in what should have been
a place of wine and olive. We shall have recourse
to our high cliff, where, if we are murdered,
at least it is by the sea. There, let us seek
the august insult of the lightning,
the never-low fury and the great bitterness,
the one and true abyss, and let us leave
the slime of the mud for the spume of the sea.