Stay Back!

 by Brett Rutherford

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

 

VI.

 

Stay back! There is a solitude
so deep that other solitudes are lost in it.

In such a place thing gloomy thinker sits.
The calm mind whose placid rivers
were serious attitudes, is stricken.

One too many indignant flashes
flew from his eye and came back to fell him.

 

The rim of darkness is beyond his reach;
he is no longer free. The anger
inside him is like a coiled serpent.
He is the sinister captive of hatred.
He, who once soothed others,
a light as they trekked to Gehenna;
he, whose own life expanded out
in waves of loving; he, the comforter,
is now the one who howls out curses!

 

He thought he had transcended suffering,
which, after all, afflicts mankind
wherever it clings to this hurtling world,
but now he feels the misery of France —
dungeons and barricades and firing squads! —
with a jab at his heart he realizes
one place is more sacred to him than all others,
his homeland, and dear, even to a heart
that beat for every one and all; so that
even the wise man’s soul is sometimes bitter.
When the mother bleeds, the man
     becomes the boy again.

 

Of course, this despair is not eternal.
Even the longest eclipse must pass;
his eyes will make out again
the august and forgiving rays of dawn.
His stooped and sobbing form will rise
after the apocalypse of infamy.
Slowly on his forehead that beam
of white light that God grants
to the great seekers, will shine,
the white light that beams down
softer and more diffuse, perhaps,
as Hope to man, a star above
the abyss, atop the silhouette
of the menacing peak, above the wall
that marks off the penal colony.
It is the rebirth of peace for all.
People might even come to love
     one another at last.

 

Stay back! His meditation is desolate,
and, seeing you, he is prone to scold.
The affront of gloom adds to his majesty —
you might think it comes with genius.
Oh, what blazes of infinite fury
pass through his shivering limbs. He is wild;
he looks at one as though to threaten all
with fists that only beat upon himself.
Begone, all thoughts of union, joy,
and utter not a word of love to him.

 

Swans grace our world in peace,
while vultures are drawn to the battlefields.
Over him arrowing, those birds of death
tell him the war is on every side.
Leave him in peace to mourn his homeland.
Sometimes a stanza, bruised and angry,
escapes him, but then he is still,
stunted from epic, to epigram, to shout,
no, even to less, an exclamation point!

 

Is he bored? Empty, he gazes on nothing.
The lamps of his orbs have dimmed; he treads
a path on which even monsters avoid him,
appalled by the shaking of his animal mane.
He seems like a wandering specter, no lair
or cave or broken tomb can hold him.
His bare feet tread the rocky way
to the bottom of despair’s ravine.

 

Grief in the starless night, grief
in gray skies without a trace of blue,
Europe in irons, in place of France
the great cold hand of universal death.

 

Stay back! Down where he meditates
in that Hades where light perishes,
in that Tartarus where nothingness
raises its smiting hand in triumph,
the future is undone, glory
becomes a word without meaning.
The dictionaries shrink as words
like “faith” and “honor” vanish
as Nothingness subsumes the Real.
Now human degradation rules
in the merry erasure of history,
as blame becomes a great-coat
and all ships float on a sea of cowardice.

 

He feels the shame of History
     as though he had authored it;
he, more and more, bears witness
to horrors with a wounded look.
Stay back! For though one might dare,
out of pity or compassion, to reach
for thorn that throbs and bleeds
as he limps along, he is still
when all is said and done, a lion.