by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année
Terrible, “June 1871”
1
Nothing like Homer, this kind of war
belongs in Tacitus: a victory
ending with a summary massacre.
The victors, satisfied, still have
a nasty temper. I hear some say:
let’s just kill off the lot
of troublemakers once
and forever — who needs them?
We need more polite Philintes,
provided they shoot Alceste.
It’s done. Death everywhere,
and not a complaint!
How easily it works.
Some wheat needs reaping
before it ever can grow ripe.
O people! Did you think
it would end with your backs
against an awful wall?
It’s all good. The strong wind
is history just sweeps them away.
A soldier stands one up
for the firing-squad,
and the prisoner says,
“Farewell, my brother.”
A woman says, “My man was killed
and nothing matters now.
Was he right? Was he wrong?
We dragged misfortune
chained like two galley-slaves.
Kill him, then kill me too.
If you do it, I am no suicide.”
Mounds of the dead
mark every crossroad.
Marched in a black platoon,
twenty singing girls pass by.
The startled crowd wonders
at their grace and innocent calm.
A passerby calls out
to the most beautiful one,
“Oh where, oh where
are they taking you?” —
She turns and calmly says, “I think
they plan to shoot us all today.”
A mournful noise fills the Lobau
barracks,
as tombs open to receive the dead,
then close again in rolling thunder.
There, lots of men are finished off
by the machine-gun’s efficiency.
No one cries out,
as if it had not occurred to them
that death
comes to each one in a singular way,
that they can hardly wait
to leave behind this sad, and harsh,
and incomplete existence.
Getting it over with seems welcome.
No one flinches. A pale boy
and his bearded grandfather
stand side by side at the wall.
One scoffs at death: the blond
child cries out, laughing: “Fire!”
Laughter in the face of death,
this proud disdain,
is a stark confession. Heed it!
Enigma! This gulf within
a glacier, baffles
ever the hoariest prophet.
What kind of life have they,
if having it or losing it
is of less care than a dice-roll?
Remember the month of May,
when everything alive
wants to touch everything else?
Instinct, soul, the sweetness
inherent in things themselves,
quicken the spirit with joy.
Remember May? Roses
don’t pick themselves.
They need young girls to admire them.
The sunny lawns
need children frolicking.
Even an old man’s winter
goes soft and melts in sunlight.
Remember past months of May,
with perfumed flower-baskets,
bees murmuring, birds up afloat
with ecstasy and spring?
What was wrong with this May?
Instead of thrilling dawn and love
and light and intoxication — what?
O terror! It was death everywhere,
the great blind one who knows not May,
implacable, an eyeless shadow.
How will they tremble and cry
beneath the shamed heavens, and sob,
and call in vain for aid
from the city, the nation,
no longer guarded by the Kindly Ones
(the gentle Eumenides
of civil accord).
No one comes now to help
the entirety of France.
We are alone, we who detest
all pell-mell murder
and groping war.
Was it a war you cheered
and watched happening,
until it happened to you?
Did your eyes tear over,
and did your arms
rise up in dark salutes of war?
Did you beg for cannons,
rifles and swords and flying bombs?
Did high walls protect you?
Did your fellow citizens rally?
How many days did you flee on foot?
Did anyone help you? Somehow,
that grave had spared you so far,
and now you shudder and scream,
“They are killing us!”
Numb now, they are alien
to everything that happened.
They watch as Death comes,
and in his shadow they barely shrug.
Oh, Him again! That’s no surprise.
This specter already
companioned them,
within each heart
a grave already dug.
Death, come and get us!
Our mere existence seems
to have suffocated our betters.
They turned their backs —
what had we done to them?
So now we know
how little we are worth.
They left us behind to die,
not even deigning a tear.
We weep that those in power
regret nothing.
In their four-chambered hearts,
one was already reserved
for torture.
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