by Brett Rutherford
After Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “June 1871”
V
The narrow path is not an easy one.
Ah! Just try it for a while. It takes
a special daring to prove the crowd wrong,
to be upright in one’s own soul
and stay that way,
to guard the universal sense of right
when all around you trample and bruise it.
When one who tries this is declared
“outlaw,”
the outlaw is rewarded with as much
of this thing called exile that the law allows.
You do not exile just anyone you please.
Not house-arrest and not imprisonment,
this punishment is inexpressible,
a terrible and almost holy thing.
How many will come and stare
at the front door of your remembered home?
How many, from afar, will squint and scan
the eaves of your old roof, and ask, “Where is he?”
Will there even be an acceptable
reply, that is not a lie, or an evasion?
Imagine him in some desert place, alone,
or crowded in where every step is watched
and no one is allowed to say his name?
What’s on his mind, in a place
where his native tongue is seldom spoken?
The flower he picked with a childish hand?
A dark street corner that one furtive glance
imbued with a spell that would never quite fade?
Old times and lessons learned in school?
Old dawns, fields that were greener then
with far more sonorous birds?
A certain blend of sky and cloud
that curtained one place, and no other?
To learn, by hear-say only
of those who died in his absence,
their bedside unattended, tombs
he would never see as moss
and vines erase familiar names.
This is exile.
Exile is a water-torture, infamous,
a timid executioner’s delight,
pangs to the heart
as granite of duty,
rings with the falling drops
and erodes away.
Exile is a compound-interest penalty
inflicted on the innocent and just,
so under Tarquin, or Augustus Caesar,
or Bonaparte, condemned men die
because they are innocent and just.
Exile, a place of shadow and longing,
is a dimly-seen mist, an expanding silence
made up of stolen glimpses,
snatches of song and bird-call,
a dark wood glimpsed, a reef
that is there one day and gone the next,
a breath, a sourceless sound,
all closing in upon a pensive brow.
Oh! Tell him his homeland still exists!
(This being true is the most terrible fact of all.)
By an invisible thread our homeland holds
us,
the one thing which, once lost,
retains its charm for us forever.
The fields of one place only
seem to belong to us,
its trees not shaped like any others,
its riverbanks, its lowering sky —
this place alone brings back our steps.
Homeless, we shall forever wander,
and if some foreign king should banish us,
we slough it off,
for banishment is not an exile.
Exile is a form of death,
taken in slices of clock and
calendar,
some letters unsent,
and many more undelivered.
Alive at his desk with pen in hand,
his words must issue forth so fast
the censors cannot catch and cancel them.
Each exile,
unique and solitary,
is given a chance for immortal glory.
As for the kings and tyrants,
full half or more of them are dust,
names scarcely recalled
in the cavalcade of idiots.
