Martyr, Volcano, Goddess, Avatar, Part 2

 by Brett Rutherford

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

 

[Poem XI]

III

City, your fate is beautiful!

High on a hill, and at the heart
of all humanity, you re-enact
an almost-biblical Passion.
None can approach without hearing
how your tender voice emerges

from your august torture,

because you suffer this for all
and for them all your blood is shed.

The peoples before you
will form a circle on their knees.

 

The nimbus glow at the top of Aetna
fears not Aeolus or any other wind.

Just so, your fierce halo
     cannot be smothered out.
Illustrious and terrible at once,
your light burns everything
    that threatens life,

     defending honor, and work and talent,
     upholding duty and right,
     healing with balm, perfume, and medicine.

You gleam the future purple
     even as you burn the past away,

because in your clarity, sad
     and pure, pale flowers spring
to life amid the embers.

In your immense love,
     gnaws an immenser pain.

 

Because you exist, and will continue so,
O city, mankind believes in progress,
seeing it born clean and viable once more.

Your tragic fate attracts the Muses’ envy.
Your death would orphan the whole universe.

The star in your wound, would, if it could,
ascend and join the heavens, but no!
Empires would trade their plunder in,
yes, even Berlin, or Carthage,
to lay hands on your crown of thorns.

Never was an anvil so hammer-bright.

 

City, no matter what,
     Europe will call your name
          as its founding goddess,
but what you must suffer
     until that day arrives!

Paris, what your glory attracts,

the tribute they come to pay you,

     costs you a martyrdom.
The challenge is accepted.

Go on, live large. Let the people show her
they always know how to be heroic.

She is still calm, you see,
     after the tyrants flee,
     after the executioners
have done their worst,
    look, there she stands!

 

It happened so gradually
    no one saw how you managed it:
the sword in your hand

     became a branch of palm.

City, do as the Greeks did,
     the Romans and Hebrews,
breaking the urn of war
     to offer up the splendid bowl
          of unity and peace.

 

The peoples will have seen you,

O magnanimous city,

after having been the light of the abyss,

after having fought as was her duty,

after having been reduced to a crater,

after the churning of volcanic chaos
    whose lava bubbled forth
    the visage of Vesuvius,
        the memory of circuses and forums
               reduced to ash,
the freedom of the world at risk
     until you returned from ash in glory
after having chased away Prussia,
     that frightful giant,

 

now rising anew from the yawning abyss,
     you, bronze-robed deity of eternity,
from flaming lava cooled,
a colossal statue, Paris!

 

IV

The “men of the past” imagine
they still exist. Just barely, I would say.
They imagine themselves living;
and the work they perform
     is all done in the shadows.
In the viscous sliding
     of their numberless folds,
     their comings and goings
     all flat on their belllies,
they are only a swarm
     of deluded earthworms.
The dead weight of the sepulcher
     presses them down to ooze.

 

Ignore them, sacred city!

Nothing of you is dead,
for, Paris, your own agony
gives birth, and your defeat
was an onset of new creation.

We will refuse you nothing.

Whatever you want, will come to pass.

The day you were born, the Impossible
reached and surpassed its expiration date.

I will affirm and will repeat it tirelessly
to the face of the perjurer,

into the ears of the deceiver,
plain on the page, where traitors
and cowards cannot avoid it.

They wounded you, oh queen,
but you live! Oh goddess, you live!

 

Against you they added insult to injury,
but still you live, Paris! From your aorta,
earth’s blood, man’s blood, alike
spurt out in never-stopping flow.
It seems the wound might never heal.

Yet in your womb, o mother in labor,
we felt the whole city move. Fetal,
an unknown universe stirs there.
We feel the beat and pulse of the future.

 

Who cares about these sinister clowns?
All will be well. No doubt, there are clouds.
We search, we see nothing. Well, it is night.
Around us is a fenced-in horizon.
Crown of future Europe, we fear for you.

Alas, what a ruin! She seems more fit
for a coffin than for a temple mount;
no model for a civic goddess here,
but instead the type of eternal mourning.

 

On looking upon her, even a man
of firm resolve must hesitate,
give out a shiver instead of a sigh.

Doubting, we weep and tremble,
but pacing around to listen,
we vaguely hear,
    from the walled shadow no torch can light,
    from the depth of defeat’s sink-hole,
from what they called your tomb,
arising, the song of a soul immense.
Huge and indomitable
     something is indeed beginning.

From out of the mist it comes:
     a new century!

 

All of our steps down here might seem
to be no more than a dark procession,
in vain, nocturnal, dubious.
“Men of the past” will scoff at me.
To them, all life, despite our work,
despite desire, is earthy stuff.
Nothing can be divine to them
until implacable eternity
     devours all in quest
of that one great living Thing.
Their pretext for doing nothing,
or doing ill, is that they’re blessed.
Death always offers a getaway.

 

For “men of the past”
     sure happiness awaits in Heaven.

Earth offers only hope,
     and nothing more.
I say that growing hope,
and waiting out the time
   it takes regrets to fade,
is Progress. One atom of hope
is a new seedling star.
Greater well-being dawns

in lesser misery.
My critics prefer the dreary darkness.

Darkness they love, to the point of blindness.

They hate the seer and would blind the soul.
What a terrible dream!

 

You hold the shroud of the city
before us and cry, “She is dead!”
That shroud for us is pricked with holes
through which the flames appear.

What does the dark zenith matter
when rays shine forth,
and constellations never seen before
arise, suns beaming to one another
profound and august affirmations.
There! The True. There! The Beautiful!
There! The Great! There! The Just!
On each and every world a form of life
with a thousand golden halos,

each life of Life partaking!

 

Amid this fest of hope,
you only contemplate the shadow.

“Look over there! A shadow!” —

“No use! There’s yet another shadow!”

Be that as it may. You cannot help yourselves.

Caught under triple veils,
you want us all to stumble about
in what you think is darkness.

 

“Men of the past,” we seek what serves.
You scurry about to invent new harms.

Our clock ascends to midnight
     and hopes for what will come;
your midnight, vertiginous,
     seems only a falling-off.
Each has his own way of seeing night.

Martyr, Volcano, Goddess, Avatar, Part 1

by Brett Rutherford

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

 

[Poem XI]

1

This, from all that has gone before,
from the dark abyss where Fate itself
seems destined to go to die, the Furies,
hatred incarnate that howls from the graves,
this, my people, is what emerges at last:
a glimmer of clarity and certitude.

Progress, and brotherhood, and faith!
A clarion voice amid my solitude
affirms it, so let the crowd acclaim
our struggle’s coda with a loud cry.

The let hamlet, relieved and joyful
whisper it up to the great Paris,
and may the Louvre, a-tremble
pass the word to every cottage.

 

This dawning hour is as clear
    as the night was dark,
and from the fierce black sky we hear
the sound of something magnificent
giving itself great birth above us.

Even in our present shadow, we hear
the rustling of titanic wings above us,
and I, in these pages so full of shock
and horror, of mourning and battle,
of fears that will not let one sleep —
hear me, if anguish’s clamor
     broke out in spite of me,
if I let fall too many words
     of our own suffering,
if I negated hope, I disavow myself!
I erase my obscure sobbing
which I would rather have lost
than uttered. Words I crossed out
and never published, o so many!

 

I strive to be, above all this
the navigator serene, the one
who fears no shock
    as the deep waves batter him.
Yet I admit my doubts, the fear
that some hideous hand might hold
the past in talon clutches
and refuse to let it go.

 

What did I fear the most?
That crime would seize justice
in stranglehold, that some
grim shadow would smother
the star we needed most
to aim toward the solstice,
that kings with whips
would drive before them
conscience made blind
and progress lamed.

If all the human spirit’s pillars
(like law and honor, Jesus
and Voltaire, reason and virtue)

remained complicit in silence,
if Truth would put its finger
to its lips in cowardice,
this century would pass away
and never pay its debt to the past.
The ship of the world
     would tilt and sink,
and we would witness

    the slow devouring,
eternal and implacable,
into uncountable layers
of shadow upon shadow,
the slow disappearance
of all thinkers, one by one!

 

With shaking pen, I pause.
My voice cries, “No!”

You will remain, O France,
the vanguard, the first.

Do they think they can kill the light?

A vulture attacks the sun, and what
does the sun bleed? More light!

It can only shed more of itself.

What fool would think to hurt the sun?

All Hell, if it tries,
will only bring forth waves of dawn
from every gaping wound it make.
Thus France goes forth,
     her spear at her side,
and where she smites
     the trembling kings
will see the bursting-out of Freedom.

 

 

II

Is this a collapse around us?
No, it is a genesis.

O Paris, what does it matter to you,
bright, burning furnace, well of flame,
that a thick fog passes by,
that it comes sideways at you
as the blowing of one more wind,
a fray as meaningless
as a medieval joust?

Some puffing away at a bellows-forge,
what does that matter
when so many storms already torment you?

 

O proud volcano, already full
of explosions, noises, storms and thunder,
tremors that make the whole earth tremble,

the metals’ melting-pot, the hearth
at which souls set themselves on fire,
do you think God’s breath is punishing you?
Do you fear this is the end for you?

No! Wrath from on high
only rekindles your fire.

Your deep swell boils over.

Fusion, not fission, for the world!

 

Paris is like the sea, a force
that cannot stop itself. Its work
is never finished. God might as well
tell the pounding tides
     “That’s quite enough!”
as put a hold on Paris.
Sometimes a man,
     who leans toward your ringing hearth
thinks he sees hellfire instead
     of the rosy hue of dawn.
We trust you: you know what kind of fire
it takes to build and transform!

 

City, whoever irritates you
     can only make you foam.

The stones they hurl
     down into the seeming abyss
yield up from you a spit of sparks.

Kings come with feeble hands
     to cut and thrust at you.
With hammer-blows of beaten iron,
lit up with lightning at the Cyclops’ forge,
you laugh at their blows
    and cover them with stars.

 

O Destiny! With ease you tear those webs
set out to catch you, those gleaming traps
sepulchral spiders build by night
dotting the dawns in morning dew.

  

The Inhuman Wave

by Brett Rutherford

Those not Frenchmen, who found themselves
in Paris during the Terror, or the Commune’s tumult,
have told of them, the unnumbered multitude,
for every jeune fille a femme terrible,
how they welled out of the slums and docksides
ten thousand strong with knives and hooks,
marched all the way to Versailles to rip
and shred the silk bedding of Marie Antoinette;
how with scarcely-human, distorted visages
they howled with joy as nuns and priests
were dragged to the chugging Guillotine;
how they bore the piked heads of nobles
from square to square while shriek-singing
enfants de la Patrie (enfants indeed
as the starving fishwives and worn-out
ladies of the after-hours avenged their rapes,
revenged miscarriages and hunger’s stillbirths,
shook fists in the names of starved-to-death
children, of menfolk vanished to dungeons).

Those horrified witnesses to ’93,
or to the doomed Commune of commons’ rage,
said they had never seen such creatures,
contorted rag-faces that scarce were seen
in daylight, demons even from Goya’s fever,
Maenads in ’71 who hurled incendiary bombs,
Medusas of the Communards reducing the Tuileries
to an ash-ground of burnt and crumbled ruins
(damn their palaces! to the flames, their documents!) —
and how in each time of revolt, indeed,
illiterate and with no scrap of paper on them,
many a hag could issue detailed death-lists
of accumulated resentment, this way, milord,
to the alley where you will be torn to bits.
Women whose work it was to skin and scale
the Seine boats’ harvest, who throttled hens,
gutted the hares and trimmed the venison —
how easily they came to blood and rending!

“Where did they all come from? One never saw
such faces! A physiognomy of anger, creatures
so hideous and filthy one could not think
they dwelt with fathers, lovers and children;
rather, they were demons of political rage,
as though every wronged, dead harridan
rose from her Black Death catacomb undead.”
Mères-grand, Citoyennes, Dames de la Mort!
Beware, kings and tyrants, the women of Paris!