They Rise, to Fall Again

by Brett Rutherford

 

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

 

VII

Oh you, who have ascended now
and call yourself master — I pity you.
Ferocious and vile, wicked and cowardly,
from those you hold in your power’s grasp
you shall receive the stunning blow,
the hangman’s noose, or disembowelment.
The future is made on the anvil of the present,
and the spider's web shall catch its maker.

 

When those masked figures come for you
amid a crowd of veiled witnesses, fists
shaking in rebuke against your tyranny;
if you could see, unmasked, unveiled,
your executioners, you would know them all —
trembling and naked and crucified,
they are your undying victims,
the faults of your turbulent yesteryears.

 

You thought you had immunity?
Now drink, drink up, you monster,
the vomit of murder and inebriation,
the bile of all our success and glory,
this cup you will now be forced to drain!

 

You stifled within you the horror
one ought to feel on inflicting harm,
the enmity and rage of the crowd
upon whose bodies your carriage rolled,
the “others” who did not count as men.
Pitying none, there is no pity left.
You counted coins to balance debt,
but the accumulated deficit of blood
from the innocent is a debit, too.
“No one will know,” you told yourself;
now No One stands before you with an axe.

 

Each larceny you carried out
to live like a king or an Olympian,
will be reversed upon you, and dust
shall be the last bed you know.
Each furious slander that came from you
will be hurled invective upon your head.
The lightning that falls upon you
is a discharge of spite from your own electrodes.
Fate’s final lesson is a bitter one:
that crime is also its own punishment.