We Did What We Had To

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “June 1871.”

XV
They do the same thing over and over,
and then they say, “It had to be done.”
The abject throne, tottering, leans
for support against the anointed gallows;
to the proud and patient cranes, the eagle
seems an impetuous and useless creature.
Coligny, the Huguenot, is dragged by his feet
to die amid Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre;
Dante is deemed mad; Rome kicks out Cato; and Rohan hires thugs to beat up Voltaire,
while he watches safe in his carriage.

All these things have been certain truths
since the sun outshone the work of gilding,
since the days Socrates and Aeschylus,
Zeno and Epictetus and Zeno,
since those below shouted “No!”
to the” Yes!” of the free heavens,
since they laughed in Gomorrah, and in
its rude twin city, when Sparta fell
and Greece was cloaked in mourning,
since — oh, since two times a thousand
years ago, when two rival crowns appeared,
one on a scaffold, one on a pedestal,
two sides of a coin, two sides of our souls,
one in spun gold as a crown of laurels,
another in stone and shaped as thorns.
To one it seems a window to what
can never be attained, locked shut;
to the other, in arrogance, it seems
like the very mirror of self-won pride.

One shines on a throne at Capri and Rome,
the other glows darkly at Golgotha.