Showing posts with label Annee Terrible. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Annee Terrible. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 5

by Brett Rutherford

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

5.

Imagine there’s an ocean
     with infinite depths

into which all troubles, cast,

close the book of destiny —
done, gone, and disappeared.

Let the ever-renewing waves
sweep clean the shore.

The tide keeps folding over
whoever is thrown into it.
Sea-maws open for new victims,
two hungry flaps for doors.

 

Hurl in the criminals!
If the innocent go, too,
punished in the confusion,
so what? It’s over now!

Judges rebuke historians
with gavels raised:
“Now, let’s not dwell on the past.”

 

To men of ice who never thaw,
always on the sharp edge
     of justice, impartial
to the to point of punishing all,
it is a matter or triage:
to cure a wound, cut off the limb.

 

Convenient it is,
to sentence men en masse.

New-minted justice
     could be order’s foundation,
but no! like fish thrown back
unwanted come to the net again,
those spared one horror
     have another in store,
their tick-marked names
up on one list and down
     on another.
All are cast into the same abyss.

 

Irrelevant: the facts, the doubts,

     the losses we all suffered
      together as a people,
the moil of the reckless men
and the brothers and women
     who followed them;
the child who took up
     the paving stones
or mocked the soldiers
      in lewd gesturing’

the crime of merely being
in a place where crimes occurred.

 

Instead we are told to believe
that everything was saved,
ills, tears, and turbulence,
not cut by a scythe, but swept
aside as though a broom

God wielded would sweep them all,
     storm-drain to sewer,
          and river to sea.
Look! The city! Open for business!

 

Smugly, you ask me to approve of this.
     What can I say? You are wrong.
The screams still echo.
The fear is palpable. The blood,
     the charnel pits, the grapeshot,
the sea so sick of justice
     it would vomit back your dead!

 

Since I stand here blaming you,
     next it is all my fault,

because I have something inside,
     that ticks and beats, and which
     you seem to be lacking.

How many more times
can lightning strike
     the blind and poor?

 

I shudder. Not to mention
the future harvest of revenges
your every action sows.

“Working for the best,” your
outcome is the worst possible.
If this in a state is wisdom,
     how does it differ
         from dementia?

 

That which flows out,
     tides back anew
with the force of the moon
     behind it.
Suffering and Hatred are sisters.

In darkness, one assumes
     the raiment of the other.

 

Now, even if I, whose guilt
    might be called a naïve innocence,
might return to that austere absence,
to the harsh and dreary isolation
    from which these last twelve months
    seemed as white as dawn,
even if some shadow, inexorable,
     called me back to my high cliff —
wretches without hope, you have
     one friend in me,
          and I will not be quiet!

 

People, you have the night
    and me, as your witnesses.
The law is dead. Hope has fallen.
Let it not see said that France
     fell into a total eclipse,
and no one said a word of protest.

I am calamity’s best friend.

 

To those who have been damned, I saw:
In Hell I walk beside you. I want to be —
to take this part, the best, to stand
beside the one who has never done evil
and whose cry will not be heard.

Your leaders led you astray; and I,
     at least, have told you history.

 

What poet would not prefer
     a golden victory?
Now I must take the part of the fallen.
My solitary march is not
     toward the flag of victory,
but somewhere off
     where the shrouds are gathered.

 

I open the grave of the common man.
And now your jeering rains upon me,
the shrieking of prostituted souls,
sarcasms paid for by the line,
gratuitous lies, the likes
of which Nonette and Maupertuis
tormented Voltaire,
     the same raised fists
which chased Rousseau away,
cries blacker than the winds
    of some Libyan sirocco,
more vile than that whip
     with leather straps
they used to scourge, in flight,
     the coffin of Molière,
the idiotic irony
     of your fierce anathemas,
the ring of dried saliva
     around the mouths
which had only yesterday spat
on the pale Christ’s forehead,
you flying stones
    eternally thrown at all
         who have been proscribed,
keep at it, fiends!

 

Outrages as yet unheard of,
     I welcome you.

I wear your insults as a badge.
The higher the affront
     against the people,
     the higher the glory.

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.

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 3

by Brett Rutherford

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

3

So those you did not kill,
     you are happy to be “rid of?”
What if they get rid of themselves?

So what if ones says,
     “Oh, very well,
          I am going abroad.”
It is a lie. Life, hollowed out,
expressionless faces drained
of their proper emotion.
Self-exile is a little death.
Flight, looking over one’s shoulder,
is not a vacation. The earth
itself seems to have cast one out;
a world, no longer round,
seems just a forest without paths.

Nameless, I fear
     I will become transparent.
Ashes descend upon my hair,
     my eyes, my fingernails
are smashed and soiled. I pass
from place to place, where signs
are in an unknown language.

Does anyone think of me?

An abyss of non-being
     opens to swallow me.

No more in the night do I hear
the turnings and sighs
of those who slept close to me.
It is all wolves and ravens here.
I am forgotten in the night forever.

 

There is a dream in which
you play yourself, but when you wake
from it you are no longer sure
of your present existence.

Back home, more lies are told
about thousands of innocent people,
who are too stunned
     to defend themselves.
You are not there to help.

Beneath that sky, in the sun
that warmed my homeland better
than anywhere else,
     I am no longer a citizen.

My home, the field I labored in,
my industry, my wife, my children —
show me the clear light
     in which they still exist!

 

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 2

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

2

And what of those condemned
to the prison transports I have written of,
dying at sea in those smothering
between-decks, borne down
by the enormity of the fleeing ship?

They cannot stand. They reel
as the floor tips at insane angles.
They eat with their fingers
     from a common tub,
drink one after another
     from a rusty can.

They roast, they freeze.

 

A howling hurricane
     torments their dungeon.
The water roars, and should one catch
a glimpse into the sky above,
there is nothing there but a cannon
extending its neck in silhouette
into the storm’s black eye.

 

Have pity if they die,
at latitude and longitude unknown,
for should they land
at the place of their intended
banishment, what then?

 

Thinking of them, I swoon
in despair and mourning.
It suffocates the self to bear
so much concern, and for so many.
If we knew their actual number,
it would numb the soul.

 

No one is bad, I tell myself,
yet how much evil our hands accomplish!

 

There is a registered list somewhere
of those who shiver on the sobbing sea,
whom even the weeping sky pities —

O land of brutal exile! —
O, to be dashed instead
     against unyielding rocks!

One man — is it you, or me? —
is thrown there, sad and worried,
     trembling and naked,
a random figure
     among a howling crowd.
Mists! Storms! Wave upon wave,
smash upon smash until no breath
remains that is not salt and spume.
Eyes in a gray mist unable to know
what is near, and what far away
in an empty, gray, falling tide.

 

One lives! He stands upright!
He has made it through Hell’s ocean.

Sands slide tormentingly;
a distant sun throbs. Sea birds
call out in no known language,
their welcome? Their mockery?

 

This is the exile’s dawn.
What if no one comes?
What if no one helps?

What if all that one owns
is the broken thread of love?


The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 1

by Brett Rutherford

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


1

Fear not, I am with you.
Perhaps I am perverse,
but I am drawn
to poor souls overwhelmed,
to those whom lightning strikes,
then strikes again.

I feel a bond of brotherhood.
You — even if I fought and won
some struggle against you —
the misery of one defeated brings
darkness upon us all.

A somber joy enlightens me.

Insults that once pelted me,
I wish now to forget.

Do sparrows and doves,
alert and about the business of peace
recall what hated names you hurled?
They fell like harmless pebbles.

Have you and I the luxury
of mutual hatred,
when they are all happy?

Are who are “they?”
The ones you could not bring
yourself to speak of: the people.

How many weeks or months have passed
since men have seen a pay-check?
It is they, the sad families,
men, woman and children,
their rights, their future,
that I defend.

I stand with the led-astray,
the weak, and this very crowd,
which, never having had
a ladder to ascend,
collapses in madness
under dark events.
Dwelling in ignorance, their air
is only inclement weather.

Alas! How many times must I
repeat the lesson I have for you?
It was up to you, the fortunate,
to lead them, to yield to them
their share of the city’s bounty.
Your faulty vision blinded them;
abused by us,
as by a miserly guardian,
the harvest reaped and hurled at us
is Wrath. The harms
they now inflict on all
is a cornucopia of hatred.

A little brotherhood
would have gone a long way.
Who guided them? Who took
their hands and taught them
to shun the shadows and walk
where the true light glimmers?

No one! We left them lost
in a labyrinth until
they came out all Minotaurs.

To be sure, they terrify you now,
in their eyes no glint
of fraternity.

Did you count on their “inherent goodness?”
Their shadowed souls fed on emptiness.
They stumbled about in search of light,
encountering various monsters
as they went,
in a fog so thick and dreary
their thoughts got tangled up
as in a brambled wood.
Adrift, they saw no lighthouse,
as currents incomprehensible
hurled them on rocks of misery.

Spun ’round and ’round
they staggered, dizzy-drunk,
stunned just like Ixion
chained to his fiery wheel,
blamed for misfortune as though
it were some primal sin of their own.

This being their plight,
I so resolved to ask
that bread and the light
of truth and learning
be given freely to all.

Or did you imagine that when
the black cannon of Vendémiaire
fired off its last charge in June,
that when the smoke cleared,
revealing the rubble of May’s
bombings, that all would be well,
since everyone in sight was dead?

What? One rooster crows,
and all past wounds should vanish?

If I were asked to help the people,
to solve their problems —
then first things first. I lean to them,
and tell them that I love them.
(Is that so difficult a thing?
The quandary may be
I mean it, and you do not.)

Everything else flows from this
one simple declaration. Yes,
I am with and of the people.
I am fiercely obstinate
about my gentleness
toward the vanquished.
Again and again I tell you,
“No! No reprisals!”

Perhaps I have grown soft with age,
but when a man weeps and sobs,
my heart grows pensive; the sight
of mothers with children in their arms,
melts me away. When I think
that they killed some old, fat lady,
harmless to anyone, whose hands
we saw reach out from a pit of corpses —
O pity! To think of all those
you still intend to do away with!

Ghosts without epitaphs
tug at our sleeves and cry,
“I was proscribed!” —
“I was a martyr!” —
“No one even told me
why it was they shot me!” —

Let this not be our table-talk
in the midst of mourning
already terrible. Let sorrows
pass through us as through a sieve;
let the wind winnow them
as they go to whatever shadow
the deep sky reserves for them.
Do the hands of the dying
reach up to tell us something? Or not?

Sunday, October 27, 2024

We Are Going to Be Shot, Part 2

by Brett Rutherford

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

Standing aloof,
     what do our pities mean to them?
What were the privileged to them
     before this time of darkness?

Did we ever protect these women?
Did we take their naked and shivering
     children in, and nourish them?
Has this one any useful skills?
     Does that one even know how to read?

 

From ignorance comes delusion.
Untaught, unloved, uncared for,
what does the cold do to them,
and what did hunger teach them?
Starvation burned the Tuileries.

 

In the name of these damaged souls,
I declare this — I, the man
immune to parades and obligations —
that a dead child moves me more
than the prospect of a defunct palace.


The poor die so easily,
     and this is why.

We find them unfathomable.
They smile, or threaten us
when all is lost to them;
haughty one moment, indifferent
the next, they almost willingly
line up for their executions.

 

We need to think on this.

These blank-eyed damned
we strike down so easily,
show no despair — but why?
Their puny lives have had no joy.

 

The thing we do to the least of us,
may be done to us in turn —
the Golden Rule’s inversion.
Our fates are linked.

 

Brothers, spread happiness below.
Fail to do this, and reap
the cost of woe above. Alas!

Were you such fools to think
the miserable could love their lives?

 

It is all a matter of balance.

True order, and lasting laws,
     a moral sense,
          a charming and virile peace:
all these you will find
     if the poor are content.

 

Just look. The hearts of the suffering
reveal themselves. A sphinx,
remaining masked, displays
its dazzling nudity.
Dark on one side, light on the other —
just probe the inky dark, and, lo!
the blaze of the abyss is clear.

 

Too easy it is, the deed complete,
to shudder and look away
as hillocks of dead rise up
among the indifferent willows.
A year from now, who will know?

A slum will be cleared, new
     houses will be offered up.
Once shrouded, the dead are gone.

Are you at ease with this?

The ghosts of enemies
who shrieked to die,
     are bad enough.
To be mocked by the poor
as you shoot them is unbearable.
They will not keep still. We quake
in fear as phantoms take residence
among us. No sleep for us
so long as our victims perish
     with such sinister ease.

 

At a Barricade



by Brett Rutherford

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

 

It was a barricade, abandoned now.
Defenders’ blood, and the blood
of innocent passers-by, ran red
upon the paving-stones.
Along with the suspected Communards,
a twelve-year-old boy is taken.
The sergeant looks down at him and asks,
“Are you part of that crowd
     that held the barricade?” —

 

“I was here for all of it,”
     the boy replies. —

“Too bad, then. That means we have to shoot you.”

 

He’s put apart from the others.
“Just wait. Your turn will come,”
     one hisses in his ear.

 

The soldiers, half-drunk, and cursing all,
line up the prisoners at a nearby wall.
The boy is spun to face and watch
the lightning-flash of the rifles, the groan,
the cry, the fall into a heap of dead
and dying.

 

“Officer — sir?” the boy stammers.

 

“What is it? Don’t worry:
we’ll get to you next.”

 

The lad holds up a gleaming watch
that dangles from a golden chain.
“My father’s watch. I’d like to go
and give it to my mother first.”
The various glances of the men
tells much of their character:

one who would rifle pockets, wants it;
another admired a well-timed lie;
one had a glimmer of conscience.

 

“Is that so,” the sergeant queries.
He put his hand on the trophy.
“For all we know it’s stolen.
And just where is ‘mother’ supposed to be?” —

 

“Right there. Our door, just next
to the fountain. It’s all
she has to remember my father.”

 

The sergeant shakes his head and smiles.
The soldiers mutter crude remarks:
“Just what you’d expect
      in this den of thieves.”
“An imbecile: just shoot him.”
“The city can breathe easy
     with this whole lot gone.” —

 

“I’ll come right back!” the boy promises.
They laugh. Rudely, the officer
pushes the boy away. “Get lost!”

 

The street waif vanishes. They search
for any other stray Communards
among the debris of barricades.
Moans and death-rattles emit
from the heap of bodies.
Faces peer out from open windows,
then dart like frightened bats
back into the watching dark.

Eyes scan the rooftops. The doors
to cellars are torn away.

 

Then something tugs
     at the sergeant’s sleeve.
The boy has returned.
Calmly he strides amid the dead —
a dying hand lifts up, and falls.
He takes his place against the wall,
proud as Viala,
     the Revolution’s boy-hero.
He shouts to the firing-squad:
“Here I am!”

 

The soldiers now turn to stare at him.

Anyone drunk is suddenly sober.

The Angel of Death is stupefied,
ashamed, and stops his work.
No one can breathe; hearts slow,
and pulses dim to a dead-march.

 

Arms lower guns
    as though they weighed a ton,
and the sergeant, stumbling,
steps into the heap of corpses
and takes the boy over and back
to the open pavement. “Go!
Go now! You are pardoned! Go!”

 

2

Child, amid the wild hurricane
of civil war, which, passing
confuses everything, good
and evil, heroes and bandits,
what lifted you on up,
or what within you rose?
How, out of ignorance,
could a sublime soul emerge?

 

A good and brave spirit,
the abyss engulfed you.
One step, toward your mother,
the other, to your death,
were laid out before you,
not destiny, but will.
The young man’s candor
fills the soldier with remorse.
No one will give account
for what he is made to do,
but this child is superb
and valiant, who might
have chosen flight, and life,
sunrises and harmless games,
spring after spring — instead
the spattered wall where all
his friends had met their deaths.

 

If I may wax classical —

O, still so young,
whom Glory bends down to kiss,
sweet friend, you are the kind of youth
the poet Stesichorus would place
defending the gates of Argos.

Stout Cynegyrus
     would call you his brother!
The ephebes of Messene
or Thebes would admit you.
Your name would be engraved there
     on disks of brass.

 

Before that serene and ancient sky
you would walk, a warrior whose steps
would be followed by ardent glances.

 

At the well, beneath the willow’s shade,
a maiden comes, filling the urn
from which the oxen will drink,
but seeing you, she pauses,
your name on her lips until
you have passed well out of sight.

She will point to the vacant space
you occupied, and look, and look.

A Woman Told Me This

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted/translated from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, "June 1871”

 

One who survived the massacres,
     a woman, arrived and told me this:

“I had to run away.
I held my little daughter tight
against my breast as I ran.
She screamed, and I knew her cries
would give away our hide-out.

 

Imagine darting to and fro
with a baby only two months old,
loud as a siren though she
was as weak as a house-fly.

 

I kissed her mouth to quiet her.
And still, she howled.
Even her moans were audible.
She wanted her mother’s breast.
I had no milk to give.

 

A whole night passed like this.
I crouched behind a driveway gate.
I wept. I saw the shining
rifle stocks go back and forth.
I heard my husband’s name
demanded at every kicked-in door.

 

Perhaps I slept a little.
Dawn was near. No sooner
had some expectant rooster
than I tried to raise myself,
the babe still swaddled close.

 

And then I knew. No breath,
the child as stiff as an armful
of kindling. I touched:
my cold hand on a colder brow.

If they killed me right then,
I could care less. One hand
around the dead child, one hand
thrust out the closed-up gate,

and I was on the street. My eyes
must have looked like those
of a lunatic. Some others,
about their own business,
as desperate as mine, perhaps,

in the not-quite-breaking day,

knew me and called my name;
a few reached out
     to give me aid.
I hurtled on. I ran.
The way to the countryside
was open, unguarded.

 

God help me, I don’t remember.
It’s just as if I walked in blindness.
I could never find that spot again
if I tried a thousand times, the place
where I dug with own hands a grave,
among tree-roots a shallow niche,

a hole just big enough to shove her in.
Oh, there was a fence, that’s all
I can bring to mind, a fence
angled behind and around me.

 

I came to my senses. My feet alone
had carried me there. My hands
were black with blood and soil.
A priest came along. He raised me up,
looked down at my inept burial
and stood and wept with me.
Then shots rang out,
close, and then closer still,
and each of us fled
    in opposite directions.
He had never asked my name,
     nor I, his.

Sunday, October 6, 2024

Marched to Her Death through the Streets of Paris

 by Brett Rutherford

 

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

 

IX

 

A woman they imprisoned — who knows
her name? — is on the street outside.
Not free, no not at all. They march
her to her execution now. Let’s watch!

 

This promenade of shame
     may take a while.

Her injuries have not yet healed.
She limps along, with who knows what
unsaid confessions on her darkened brow.
Soldiers on either side, and one to push
if she resists — hand-shackles prevent
her lashing out, her feet too lame to run.

She must endure the crowds’ shaking fists.
Their curses seem to roll right off;
beneath her tangled hair, one eye
glares out the way a caged beast regards
tormenters it has grown familiar with.
Her other eye is swollen shut; a bruise
runs down from ear to chin. A witch
she seems, or a surly brute or beast.
All view her through a haze of hate.

 

She is moved about
     like some chessboard pawn,
forward, then turned, and forward again,
for a maximum audience.
A religious procession
     could not be better planned.
What was her crime? What class
of category of offender describe her?
Was there a formal indictment
that listed her offence? Who knows?
Charges fly back and forth amid
the terrible smoke of Paris. Ask her
has she a clue why she was arrested?

 

They say, “If a man does such-and-such,”
that is a crime, no questions asked.
Is it as blunt as that? Look at an act,
and see the spirit of the thing —
famine, rumors and some bad advice,
a call to arms from the loudest mouth,
some popular bandit so monstrous proud
people love him and do anything he says —
that’s all it takes for some dark agent
to turn and distort a person’s good nature.

 

This swell of violence, once entered on,
this adventure goes one way only,
driven by instinct down an inclined plane,
backed by bad luck’s fatal hurricane,
wrath upon wrath compounding depravity,
hurling itself in fury into civil war,
revealing beneath a well-lit city,
a tangled black forest with no way out.
The Cyclops eye of want and exclusion
provokes a mass howl of envy:
“Others have everything, and I have nothing!”

 

Thinking is dangerous when you sit in rags.
Evil springs up from an empty belly.

You wander why a man becomes terrible,
when he sits at a table that has no bread.
A neighborhood the mice desert
is bound to be a place of wrath.

 

She is made to cross an open square.
Crowds show no mercy as she passes through.
The well-off have their triumph, already
they have enjoyed the thrill of punishment.
Do their tears of joy blind them to her?
Is her bloody silence their kind of victory,
a silence heard all the way out
     to the feasting at Versailles?

 

On every block, the passersby laugh
to see the prisoner stumble by.
A swarm of children chases behind;
their mocking bright cries assault her.
Bubble of bitter spittle line her mouth.
Deaf to their insults, she flinches not.
Various crimes are shouted out,
     a gelid raven-cloud of blame,
fading out only
     when her Gorgon locks pass
     and the corner is turned.

 

Now, in a better neighborhood,
a crowd of women emerge from a park:
nursemaids and courtesans,
schoolgirls and nuns and seamstresses.
They open umbrellas against the sun
and follow along, their eyes
     dark stars of ferocity.
Look! How amusing! Let’s follow!
How close can we get to the execution?

 

A house-door opens — a betrothal party
pours to the sidewalk to see the show.
Look at those diamonds! Who would have thought
there was a war on? A spinster pokes
with her umbrella toward the prisoner’s face.
There! She’s bleeding! Serves her right!

 

I pity the wretch; I condemn the crowds.
I recoil in horror at this day-lit Paris,
as she-dogs come slathering forth
to bite and maim a wild she-wolf.

 

Their laughter is worse
     than her firing squad.

 

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

The Arsonist


 

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1870”

One strides before me with a flaming brand.
I call him back. He turns and faces me. I ask,
“Are you the one who just burned down
     the library of the Louvre?”
He wipes his brow, puts down the torch,
extends a fraternal hand toward me.
“Yes, sir,” he says. “That fire you see,
was nearly all my work.” My hand
does all it can to not become a fist.

“But that’s a crime!” I shout. “Incredible!
A crime against yourself, an infamy.
In that black smoke, the ray of your soul
has been extinguished. The very torch
you held so proudly up is canceled
by the horror of what you have done.
What have you burned in this mad rage?
Your property! Your honor! Your dowry!
The whole of your inheritance!”

He would race on; I stop him.
Hands on his shoulders, man-to-man,
I must, I must, I must
     get through to him somehow.

He waits me out, he knows enough
to understand respect
for a distraught old poet, at least.
So I do my best to explain.

“Some of those books
were your masters’ worst enemies.
They worked to your advantage.
The book has always taken up your cause.
What is a library but an act of faith
that darker times invest against the coming sun?
By telling the truth, they bear witness for us.

“What seems to you a tomb to desecrate,
is a living repertory, a mass of truths,
out down in masterpieces so fine
that lightning and clarity spark out from them.
Out of the centuries the speak; they tell
of ancient men, in histories that spell
a warning to the future. And in the poets,
thoughts that first came and never ceased
to echo, live on and on. Bibles die here,
lost in the abyss with a thousand authors,
Homers and Aeschyluses, Shakespeares and Jobs,
far off the upper-shelf horizon; they led the way
to Molière, Voltaire and Kant.
Into Reason itself you cast your wretched,
flaming torch, the human spirit up in smoke!

“Books liberate men. Have you forgotten this?
One book can stand above the human fray.
It glows with its own light. Because it shines
its pure white beam of reason, the scaffolds
fall, wars stop, and famine is averted.
A book well-read ends slavery, calls home
the outcasts whom ignorance banished.

“Just open a book. Plato, Milton, Beccaria.
Prophetic texts! Dante, or Shakespeare, or Corneille;
the great soul that dwells within them
awakens in you. Dazzled, you feel transformed.
You tread their steps and think their thoughts,
as though you had been, all along, one person.
Reading makes you serious, thoughtful, and kind.

“You are quite young. Perhaps you doubt ideas
can leap from a page into your own being.
The great men past await your company,
the same way dawn gold-lights a cloister.
Ideas plunge deep into your understanding.
Their warm rays soothe and quicken you.
Your hesitating soul gains confidence.

“At last you recognize yourself as good,
and capable of better — old prides and furies,
evils and prejudices, even the obeisance
you once gave to kings and emperors
melt off like snow at the start of spring,
all because knowing pushes fear aside.

“Then freedom comes.
     Yours were this light and glory,
yours between those walls of stone,
and it’s you who have blacked them out!
All that you dreamt of ever being —
some book in there could show the way.
Books read and thought about
     sever the Gordian knots
that error and truth were tangled in.
Doctor, guide, and guardian, a book!
One would have healed your hatred,
     another your madness —
Not yours! Not now! And it is all your fault!

The book is your wealth. Where but from here
do knowledge, law, truth, virtue, and duty,
progress, and reason, dispel delirium?
How could you have done this? Answer me!”

This is, in so many words,
     what I try to tell him.
The Arsonist regards me. He looks
half-mad, half-god. My words
have stunned him. As eye to eye
he keeps my gaze, he answers:

“No one ever taught me
     how to read.”