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.

 

We Are Going to Be Shot, Part 1

by Brett Rutherford

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

 

1

Nothing like Homer, this kind of war
belongs in Tacitus: a victory
ending with a summary massacre.

The victors, satisfied, still have
a nasty temper. I hear some say:
let’s just kill off the lot
     of troublemakers once
     and forever — who needs them?

We need more polite Philintes,
provided they shoot Alceste.

 

It’s done. Death everywhere,
     and not a complaint!
How easily it works.

Some wheat needs reaping
before it ever can grow ripe.

 

O people! Did you think
it would end with your backs
against an awful wall?

It’s all good. The strong wind
is history just sweeps them away.

 

A soldier stands one up
     for the firing-squad,
and the prisoner says,
     “Farewell, my brother.”

 

A woman says, “My man was killed
and nothing matters now.

Was he right? Was he wrong?
We dragged misfortune
chained like two galley-slaves.
Kill him, then kill me too.
If you do it, I am no suicide.”

 

Mounds of the dead
mark every crossroad.
Marched in a black platoon,
twenty singing girls pass by.
The startled crowd wonders
at their grace and innocent calm.
A passerby calls out
to the most beautiful one,
“Oh where, oh where
are they taking you?” —

 

She turns and calmly says, “I think
they plan to shoot us all today.”

 

A mournful noise fills the Lobau barracks,
     as tombs open to receive the dead,
     then close again in rolling thunder.
There, lots of men are finished off
     by the machine-gun’s efficiency.
No one cries out,
as if it had not occurred to them
     that death
comes to each one in a singular way,
that they can hardly wait
to leave behind this sad, and harsh,
and incomplete existence.

Getting it over with seems welcome.

No one flinches. A pale boy
and his bearded grandfather
stand side by side at the wall.
One scoffs at death: the blond
child cries out, laughing: “Fire!”

 

Laughter in the face of death,
     this proud disdain,
is a stark confession. Heed it!

Enigma! This gulf within
     a glacier, baffles
ever the hoariest prophet.
What kind of life have they,
if having it or losing it
is of less care than a dice-roll?

 

Remember the month of May,
when everything alive
wants to touch everything else?

Instinct, soul, the sweetness
inherent in things themselves,
quicken the spirit with joy.

Remember May? Roses
don’t pick themselves.
They need young girls to admire them.
The sunny lawns
      need children frolicking.
Even an old man’s winter
goes soft and melts in sunlight.

 

Remember past months of May,
with perfumed flower-baskets,
bees murmuring, birds up afloat
with ecstasy and spring?
What was wrong with this May?
Instead of thrilling dawn and love
and light and intoxication — what?

 

O terror! It was death everywhere,
the great blind one who knows not May,
implacable, an eyeless shadow.
How will they tremble and cry
beneath the shamed heavens, and sob,
and call in vain for aid
from the city, the nation,
no longer guarded by the Kindly Ones
(the gentle Eumenides
     of civil accord).

 

No one comes now to help
the entirety of France.

We are alone, we who detest
all pell-mell murder
     and groping war.

 

Was it a war you cheered
     and watched happening,
until it happened to you?
Did your eyes tear over,
     and did your arms
rise up in dark salutes of war?
Did you beg for cannons,
rifles and swords and flying bombs?

Did high walls protect you?
Did your fellow citizens rally?

How many days did you flee on foot?
Did anyone help you? Somehow,
that grave had spared you so far,
and now you shudder and scream,
“They are killing us!”

 

Numb now, they are alien
to everything that happened.
They watch as Death comes,
and in his shadow they barely shrug.
Oh, Him again! That’s no surprise.

This specter already
     companioned them,
within each heart
a grave already dug.

 

Death, come and get us!
Our mere existence seems
to have suffocated our betters.
They turned their backs —
what had we done to them?
So now we know
     how little we are worth.
They left us behind to die,
not even deigning a tear.

 

We weep that those in power
     regret nothing.

In their four-chambered hearts,
     one was already reserved
          for torture.

 

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.

Is It Night? Is It Day?

The Army of Versailles re-enters Paris to fight the Paris Commune, May 21, 1871.

 

by Brett Rutherford

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

The horror comes at twilight,
neither day nor night.
All pale and neutral shades give way
to an immensity of anger.
Thunderbolts flash, but after them
comes only a muffled rumbling.
Pale and shivering, we attend.
Some gesture meant to torture us
gropes imbecilicly in glancing blows.
No steeple or crucifix stand out,
and nothing human flies or floats.
The odds of surviving
in this field of carnage
are slim, where people
already vanquished line up
to be machine-gunned,
clueless as to why, as what
some claimed a duty
was, to others, crime.

Up, up, the shadow ascends
to the peak of Babel’s tower.
Bandits held sixty-four hostages
and killed them; the other side
responds by ordering
six thousand prisoners to die.
He who weeps first,
should the last to mock
another’s misfortune.
Conscience always was, at best,
a dim night-light; this wind
seems to have extinguished it.
O night of blinding haze!
Hour of our peril!

Exterminators, well-dressed
and speaking softly,
make fury pleasing to the palette,
and someone who pleads, “Forgive!”
is made the monster.

It is the Army against the People.
Look, it is only France that bleeds.
Ignorance pitted against
ignorance never wins peace.
The law has fallen on its face.
The last one standing
is always Cain.
Like sooted snow, crime hovers
over everything,
and cannot be brushed away.
The innocent are blackened
as this shadow covers them.
One is sent off to set fire
to Louvre?
“Huh? What is the Louvre?”
He has no idea. Another,
off to horrible exploits,
races ahead of him stupidly.
Where are the laws?

The shadow realm sweeps over Paris,
with flames as its somber progeny,
a greedy sisterhood consuming wood and brick.
Hearts, burned and suffocated, ceased
to beat; souls, not seeing light
to flee to, snuffled out dismally.
One kill with blinded eyes.
Another, knowing nothing, dies.
All perish in one mélange of misery:
the blond child, the terrified slave
chained to his place in the galley,
fathers along with sons, young and old,
the sword that felled the reprobate
cuts down a figure running, a nun.
Death cuts with the same indifferent swath
the philosophic dreamer,
along with the drunk in the gutter.
Into a common abyss they all expire.
In the terrifying inferno we seem to hear
a single voice bellowing, a brazen ox,
but whose voices are compounded there
to make a single scream indicting chaos?