A Revolution on Trial

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “July 1871”

 

You, judges, sitting at the high bar,
imagining the verdict you might make
if Revolution herself were brought to trial,
a harsh, barbaric ferocious defendant
whom even screech-owls flee in panic, who,
respecting no magic makes way through dervishes
and fakirs and marabouts,
not even sparing the church, priests and nuns
scattered, Jesuits in terror and deshabilé.
Knowing that half of this was done
when Revolution merely showed her face,
you, judges, are inflamed with anger.

 

If kings are nothing but inflated men,
and gods are only men exaggerated,
those ghosts that lorded over us
from mountaintops just fade away.
A ghost in armor is a pile of junk.
The reliquary, sacral Popes
are nothing but dried-up ghouls.
That unexpected wind that blows
upon your august brows, o judges,
is a blast from Nature’s bowels.
Your faces distort in outrage.

 

What mourning! What agonies!
Here no fiery burning bush —

instead a black shrub that weeps.

Night’s festivals, voracious and cruel
are done, and only groans remain.

 

An awful day of trial has come.
Smiting their own broad chests,
the interrogators have failed.

Dredging the dark for evidence,
they have come up empty.

The blind bat cannot bear witness;
the weasels wander aimlessly
and shriek in an unknown language;
the lowly worm has lost its dignity
and cannot be pressed for answers.
A solitary fox cries out;
alas, the nocturnal animals

who hunted in that realm of night

     while the birds slumbered,
are at bay, and do not
      respond to summonses.

Wolves are about, and make the woods
too desolate for the bailiffs.

There is no calling up the dead:
the ghosts, oppressed, no longer speak
and jostle one another randomly.

 

Where will you find the evidence?

Have you a good description, even,
of what Revolution looks like,
     and what kind of garb she wears?

Her last known address was everywhere
a month ago, and nowhere at all today.

 

The sun is all wrong: you squint,
     adjust the shades against
     too early light: too hard to read
those endless indictments
     that looked so fine in candle-light!

If things go on this way, goldfish
will dart from ray to shade until
they droop and fall exhausted;
the ravens will hover overhead,
but never choose a place to land;
too weak to lift their coffin lids,
even the loathsome vampires starve.

 

Your inquiries have turned
all Nature topsy-turvy, and you
are no wiser than when you began.

You, in your robes, daring to think
that Revolution could be put in chains,
and marched away to the galleys,
the truth is right before you —
it is the dawn itself you try to stop.