The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 4

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

4

To deny me the right to be,
     is to kill me.
To deny me the right to do good,
     you hack my limbs
     and make me useless.

Am I nothing but a head that screams?
Unheard amid an infamous storm,
I crash at random
where bitter foam and wave collide.

 

To say I have no right to France,
     my Mother? How can this be?
I have my uses, you know.
Can I not probe, O victors,
into the dark social well
that gapes at your hearts’ bottom?

Have I no knack
     of discerning evil,
     of finding remedies,
of looking everywhere
for an Archimedes lever
that would bring us back to peace?

 

Someone must forge the key
to the new times coming. Poets
devoid of credit and bank accounts,
might seem to have something to offer.

We have fought much;
     sometimes we have worked together.
Proud social trials
     have come to naught;
some vaunted efforts
     have shown success.
We struggled together.

 

Why turn your thinkers,
doctors and guides,
your philosophical elder
brothers, into a pile
of shipwrecked wretches,
gasping on an unknown shore?

 

Are we unclear and mysterious?

Will banning our books suffice
to silence all enigmas?
Will the Sphinx do penance
and genuflect to Christ?

The deeds of old men, the spite
of thwarted children, rule the day.
What a future, statesmen!
Philosophers, oh, what a dream!

 

It comes down to policy:
expel enough people,
and everything will be fine.

Enough of grievances,
     catastrophes,
anguish and convulsion!

Just go back home and shout:
“I am a minister
     and everything is fine.
Don’t look at that sinister horizon.
Ignore those heavy, haggard clouds,
red blood-bloated specters floating there
are angels misperceived. All’s right.

That is not hell-fire there. It’s dawn.”

 

This vessel has death for a pilot.
It is the Raft of the Medusa.