The Frailty of History

 by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l”Année Terrible, “May 1871”

 

The centuries belong to the people,
and yet each moment they possess
the people can snatch away.
Relentlessly they tear bits
from History, a struggle strange
and self-defeating. If deeds and facts
hang on a tree for all to regard,
one comes along to trim a branch;
another follows, and with a noise
a whole millennium comes crashing down.
No, matter, they say: the trunk
of a bare tree tells a better story.

 

Like this, the shards of brass are pried
from our Roman column; like that,
fragments of marble are hammered off
from the proud arch of memory.
Names and dates, faces and arms
fall to the ground as rubble.

What would they say of Venice
if Saint Marks’ drove away its lions?

 

Now at the deathbed of glory,
sits History, an enfeebled nurse,
embaring her arms to show her scars.
Perhaps, expiring, poor Glory sighs,
“Whatever one thinks of France —
      of the France that we once knew —
looking out at this tough army,
     this ever-proud people,
taking in all that in this century
     I, in its third glory, had dreamed of,
     the good we wished for and strove
            to make happen —
oh, this was illustrious!”

 

So why with hammer and petrol
     do you come to erase the past?

What have you done else for the suffering,
     for the shattered workers?
Have you shut down the penal colonies?
Oh, chronicles will be shorter now,
an easier task for the lecturers:
but give me the names
     of all those new schools you opened —
          I’ll wait for your reply.

Out in the streets, mobs come to destroy
all record of Marengo, Lodi,
     Wagram, and Arcole;
along the way did they make pause
to establish universal love? I thought not.

 

Does the man who was starving a year ago
now have a roof above him,
a hearth, a loaf of bread, some salt?
Have we honored the renunciation of war
by indulging in mad and sinister bloodshed?

Have the laws been re-done
     in the image of what is right?

Did I somehow miss the grand opening
of the new temple where clarity distills
into reason, and the result is freedom?

 

Has the child a right to school,
     the woman the right of her own person?
Have the acorns of the tree of truth
     been planted in men,
so as it grows within them, they
grow stronger and less prone to error?
Has the slow train of Progress
resumed on its narrow track,
from which new branches grow ever out?

 

No! Just ruins. Nothing. And so it is.
And as for me, I truly doubt
the murmuring people will be satisfied
when you protest: “Don’t look at this!
Don’t trouble yourselves with misery.
We don’t accomplish much, but what a show
we make of demolition!”