The Two Voices, Part 2

by Brett Rutherford

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

THE HIGH VOICE

Do not listen. Remain a faithful soul.

A heart, no more than a sky, can be darkened.

I am conscience, a virgin; and this

is what the State calls Reason, a public harlot.

She confuses the true by the falsehood she explicates.

 

She is the bastard and shifty sister
     of common sense.

I admit that dim light has its supporters;

that it is found excellent and useful

to avoid a shock, to ward off a bullet,

to walk a straight way at a dark crossroad,

and to prepare oneself for small duties.

Inn-keepers make practicality
     their motto and shop-sign.

What goes for it is its simplicity,
     the way of the short-sighted,

the clever, the shrewd, the prudent,
     the discreet, those who can only
          and ever see things up close,

those who crouch down to examine webs
     with the tenacity of a spider —

but someone must be for the stars!

 

Someone is needed
     who will stand for fraternity,

honor and clemency, freedom and law,

and for truth, even if truth
     is in a place of dark resplendence!

The darker the night you are in,
     the more sublime the constellations!

They shine, eternal summer’s blooms;

but they need, in their serenity,

that the watching universe

     in need of guidance,
           bears witness to them;
they need to know that,

renewed on earth from age to age,

one man, reassuring his condemned brothers,

cries through the night: Oh stars, shine on!

 

Nothing would be more frightening than this:
that ray and shadow, virtue and crime
were one and the same in the abyss of night.
Nothing would accuse and cancel God more
than this lost clarity of distinction. If we
and all our thoughts and deeds, bled out
into the depths of the heavens
     without will or meaning.
Nothing would drive the universe more mad
that the uselessness of its own light.

Therefore justice is good.
     The star in whose name
          we seek it is good.
Just think: in twenty terrible countries,
among them Sudan, Darfur, and Gabon,
it was the unchallenged law
that humans were taken, bound, and dragged,
transported and sold by force, until
in the rising of a star, a Wilberforce[1]

dragged nations to the bench
     and shouted, “No!”
From whence come such men?
    

If random men be just,
     even at the cost of martyrdom,
the universe redeems itself.

To let justice come out of oneself,

     is the true radiance of man.

Wherever iniquity act is done,

wherever its ill gains accumulate to power,

a voice must speak.
It is necessary that in the night,
a light, like a comet, suddenly appears.

 

In heaven this god, the True,
     on earth its priests, the Just.
These are the two necessities.

The way the wind is blowing
     must be contradicted.

The flood of the inevitable
     must be resisted.

Thus rise and soar
     fairness and equality.
There is no other rule.

 

Who, then, takes the summit

of Mont Blanc as his home?
     The eagle.

 

---

[1] William Wilberforce (24 August 1759 – 29 July 1833), reformer whose anti-slavery crusades led to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire.