The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 3

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "June 1871"

3

So those you did not kill,
     you are happy to be “rid of?”
What if they get rid of themselves?

So what if ones says,
     “Oh, very well,
          I am going abroad.”
It is a lie. Life, hollowed out,
expressionless faces drained
of their proper emotion.
Self-exile is a little death.
Flight, looking over one’s shoulder,
is not a vacation. The earth
itself seems to have cast one out;
a world, no longer round,
seems just a forest without paths.

Nameless, I fear
     I will become transparent.
Ashes descend upon my hair,
     my eyes, my fingernails
are smashed and soiled. I pass
from place to place, where signs
are in an unknown language.

Does anyone think of me?

An abyss of non-being
     opens to swallow me.

No more in the night do I hear
the turnings and sighs
of those who slept close to me.
It is all wolves and ravens here.
I am forgotten in the night forever.

 

There is a dream in which
you play yourself, but when you wake
from it you are no longer sure
of your present existence.

Back home, more lies are told
about thousands of innocent people,
who are too stunned
     to defend themselves.
You are not there to help.

Beneath that sky, in the sun
that warmed my homeland better
than anywhere else,
     I am no longer a citizen.

My home, the field I labored in,
my industry, my wife, my children —
show me the clear light
     in which they still exist!