Charles Hugo
by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “July 1871.”
X
Charles, my son, I feel your presence now.
Sweet martyr, beneath the earth
that takes everyone,
I look for some sign of you
when through the tiny fissures of
your tomb
pale dawn juts out its coruscating rays.
The dead, boxed up at last in their coffins,
attend to themselves in their final cradles,
and while I weep on bended knees, these two,
dear Georges and Jeanne, these little children sing.
Sing to me, unaware of my sorrows.
How like your father in both dark and light
you are, gloomed by his absented shadow,
yet gilded by his vague illumining.
Alas, what did
we know, anyway,
if we were not aware of Death
alive and striding among us?
Do angels, enjoining
amid the stars
look down from paradise and laugh at us?
Yet such a
paradise is in the child.
Even the orphan has God inside him.
God, even as I suffer in my cloud
of sorrow, tries to defend these little ones
with the celestial glow of innocence.
Be joyful then. Children,
go out and play!
Let me be overwhelmed, alone in grief.
So much has been borne, so much still to come!
It has never occurred to them to count
their years so few against mine so many,
to say “Grandfather has lived in this world
for near a hundred years, a century!”
At this age, a man is troubled by ghosts,
shadows and shadows and doubts and regrets.
He tallies up the good he did and asks —
“This much and more again, would that suffice?”
Is there less
hate now that I’ve come and gone?
Have I treated my enemy brother,
and did he grasp the hand I extended?
Even best efforts, sometimes, are not enough.
Celebrations one day, remorse the next.
The irony is
that I triumphed best
in heart and mind, in moments of defeat
because my greatest foe was Compromise.
Thus, seeing
myself defeated, I grew.
That we still live, pain re-assures us.
Blood-lust has never been my nature.
Instead, I am the one blows fall upon.
Sad law, it
seems that with vitality,
an even more vital illness tags along.
Young, unknown, one has a certain power.
In fame, one walks around as a target.
More branches than ever spread out from me,
and as they spread, my shadow terrifies.
It might not be safe to be around me.
I would spare
you the gloom of my mourning,
you two, in your own charmed spell encircled.
You are the opening of souls in bloom,
and here with the dawn comes Nature immense.
Georges blooms, like a shrub that means to fill out
the empty, dismal field of my mourning.
Jeanne, in her flowering, corolla bright
that hides within, a still-trembling spirit.
Amid our noises, distantly, it speaks.
Let children
stammer on and hesitate
(they know yet what misfortunes await them!)
as humble plants, vermilion-hued, exhale
the murmur of flowers, the buzz of bees,
in their tiny world not bound by limits.
That everything you
see must slip away,
you all too soon shall learn, alas for you!
That only in a storm’s tumult and roar
does lightning come, our beaming torch and brand,
whenever we try to liberate the people,
that self-same Atlas who bears up the world.
What some say is
Fate, is to others, Chance:
this you will learn, and will bear up under.
Humans are so augustly ignorant,
they must endure, adapt, in such a way
that later the truth seems what was dreamt of.
When I am gone
to wherever it is
that one goes to after death, I suppose
I shall grasp only then my “Destiny,”
a topic on which I plead ignorance.
Will I look back at you, and hover there
all full of mystery and intimations?
Sure, I will
carry within me always
the stigma of exile, thrown like a shroud
over your childhood, and the more recent wounds
by which one’s own justice and gentleness
was made to seem a crime, offense to all.
Once I am
incorporeal, perhaps
I will glean why, while children sang
beneath my funeral boughs, while I
pled pity instead of retribution
to all who hear, as evil’s antipode,
was made to retreat in so much darkness.
Perhaps it makes more sense to ghosts.
Once I am beyond
affront, and the sting
of bearing up to so many monsters,
I will know why
implacable shadows follow me,
why there are lists
of massacres one after another
why endless winter envelops me,
why everywhere I go
I lie on someone’s grave
why I was weighed down
with fights and tears and regrets
and so many sad things,
and why,
when you two were roses
God chose to make me a cypress tree.
