Terrible Weather

 by Brett Rutherford

 

     Translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “April 1871”

 

Terrible weather! In this dreary space
where the unforeseen arises,
     and the unexpected wants to come to pass,
my thoughts are a meadow
     given over to random invasions.

 

News reaches me, one fact after another;
blacker they get, and greater in enormity.
Day after day as I write this book,
the clock dictates new miseries
as the minute-hand rises and flees in terror.

Hours, mornings, noon, twilight and night,
how many? The numbered weeks of this Terrible Year
are like so many hydras that Hell creates
in order to fill its own abysses, bottomless.

 

Word of the last calamity wheels over me and passes on;
its claw on my soul, it rolls its fiery eyes,
leaving in my crumpled lines, sad, harsh, and bruised,
the track that one sees when a monster has passed.

 

If you could truly see into my shadowed mind,
you would find it marred with the countless imprints
of all these days of horror, and anger and bored inaction.
I look as if lions had walked all over me.