Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”
1
Fear not, I am with you.
Perhaps I am perverse,
but I am drawn
to poor souls overwhelmed,
to those whom lightning strikes,
then strikes again.
I feel a bond of brotherhood.
You — even if I fought and won
some struggle against you —
the misery of one defeated brings
darkness upon us all.
A somber joy enlightens me.
Insults that once pelted me,
I wish now to forget.
Do sparrows and doves,
alert and about the business of peace
recall what hated names you hurled?
They fell like harmless pebbles.
Have you and I the luxury
of mutual hatred,
when they are all happy?
Are who are “they?”
The ones you could not bring
yourself to speak of: the people.
How many weeks or months have passed
since men have seen a pay-check?
It is they, the sad families,
men, woman and children,
their rights, their future,
that I defend.
I stand with the led-astray,
the weak, and this very crowd,
which, never having had
a ladder to ascend,
collapses in madness
under dark events.
Dwelling in ignorance, their air
is only inclement weather.
Alas! How many times must I
repeat the lesson I have for you?
It was up to you, the fortunate,
to lead them, to yield to them
their share of the city’s bounty.
Your faulty vision blinded them;
abused by us,
as by a miserly guardian,
the harvest reaped and hurled at us
is Wrath. The harms
they now inflict on all
is a cornucopia of hatred.
A little brotherhood
would have gone a long way.
Who guided them? Who took
their hands and taught them
to shun the shadows and walk
where the true light glimmers?
No one! We left them lost
in a labyrinth until
they came out all Minotaurs.
To be sure, they terrify you now,
in their eyes no glint
of fraternity.
Did you count on their “inherent goodness?”
Their shadowed souls fed on emptiness.
They stumbled about in search of light,
encountering various monsters
as they went,
in a fog so thick and dreary
their thoughts got tangled up
as in a brambled wood.
Adrift, they saw no lighthouse,
as currents incomprehensible
hurled them on rocks of misery.
Spun ’round and ’round
they staggered, dizzy-drunk,
stunned just like Ixion
chained to his fiery wheel,
blamed for misfortune as though
it were some primal sin of their own.
This being their plight,
I so resolved to ask
that bread and the light
of truth and learning
be given freely to all.
Or did you imagine that when
the black cannon of Vendémiaire
fired off its last charge in June,
that when the smoke cleared,
revealing the rubble of May’s
bombings, that all would be well,
since everyone in sight was dead?
What? One rooster crows,
and all past wounds should vanish?
If I were asked to help the people,
to solve their problems —
then first things first. I lean to them,
and tell them that I love them.
(Is that so difficult a thing?
The quandary may be
I mean it, and you do not.)
Everything else flows from this
one simple declaration. Yes,
I am with and of the people.
I am fiercely obstinate
about my gentleness
toward the vanquished.
Again and again I tell you,
“No! No reprisals!”
Perhaps I have grown soft with age,
but when a man weeps and sobs,
my heart grows pensive; the sight
of mothers with children in their arms,
melts me away. When I think
that they killed some old, fat lady,
harmless to anyone, whose hands
we saw reach out from a pit of corpses —
O pity! To think of all those
you still intend to do away with!
Ghosts without epitaphs
tug at our sleeves and cry,
“I was proscribed!” —
“I was a martyr!” —
“No one even told me
why it was they shot me!” —
Let this not be our table-talk
in the midst of mourning
already terrible. Let sorrows
pass through us as through a sieve;
let the wind winnow them
as they go to whatever shadow
the deep sky reserves for them.
Do the hands of the dying
reach up to tell us something? Or not?
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