Is It Night? Is It Day?

The Army of Versailles re-enters Paris to fight the Paris Commune, May 21, 1871.

 

by Brett Rutherford

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

The horror comes at twilight,
neither day nor night.
All pale and neutral shades give way
to an immensity of anger.
Thunderbolts flash, but after them
comes only a muffled rumbling.
Pale and shivering, we attend.
Some gesture meant to torture us
gropes imbecilicly in glancing blows.
No steeple or crucifix stand out,
and nothing human flies or floats.
The odds of surviving
in this field of carnage
are slim, where people
already vanquished line up
to be machine-gunned,
clueless as to why, as what
some claimed a duty
was, to others, crime.

Up, up, the shadow ascends
to the peak of Babel’s tower.
Bandits held sixty-four hostages
and killed them; the other side
responds by ordering
six thousand prisoners to die.
He who weeps first,
should the last to mock
another’s misfortune.
Conscience always was, at best,
a dim night-light; this wind
seems to have extinguished it.
O night of blinding haze!
Hour of our peril!

Exterminators, well-dressed
and speaking softly,
make fury pleasing to the palette,
and someone who pleads, “Forgive!”
is made the monster.

It is the Army against the People.
Look, it is only France that bleeds.
Ignorance pitted against
ignorance never wins peace.
The law has fallen on its face.
The last one standing
is always Cain.
Like sooted snow, crime hovers
over everything,
and cannot be brushed away.
The innocent are blackened
as this shadow covers them.
One is sent off to set fire
to Louvre?
“Huh? What is the Louvre?”
He has no idea. Another,
off to horrible exploits,
races ahead of him stupidly.
Where are the laws?

The shadow realm sweeps over Paris,
with flames as its somber progeny,
a greedy sisterhood consuming wood and brick.
Hearts, burned and suffocated, ceased
to beat; souls, not seeing light
to flee to, snuffled out dismally.
One kill with blinded eyes.
Another, knowing nothing, dies.
All perish in one mélange of misery:
the blond child, the terrified slave
chained to his place in the galley,
fathers along with sons, young and old,
the sword that felled the reprobate
cuts down a figure running, a nun.
Death cuts with the same indifferent swath
the philosophic dreamer,
along with the drunk in the gutter.
Into a common abyss they all expire.
In the terrifying inferno we seem to hear
a single voice bellowing, a brazen ox,
but whose voices are compounded there
to make a single scream indicting chaos?