Thanking the Guests

by Brett Rutherford

Alice, a vulture stuffed
with bread and celery,
onion and pomegranate,
is still a vulture,
tough as old moccasins.
We tried our best.

Vera, the cornucopia you sent

erupted snakes,

okra, and cauliflower.

Try as I might,

no recipe came to mind

so I placed most of it

in my guests' coat-pockets.

 

Philippe, that loaf you brought

looked tasty brown

until it bled purple,

a slime-mold fuligo

from a dead tree's base.

Well, it's the thought that counts.

 

Rose, the bouquet you brought

must have cost someone

a pretty penny.

I saw it just yesterday

in the nearby cemetery.

For me? You shouldn't have.

 

Next year, pot luck, chez vous.

To the Cannon Named After Me

 

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "December 1870"

IV

Listen to me today, for soon enough
your turn will come to be the one listened to.
O cannon, feared warrior and thunderer,
dragon full of anger and shadow, whose mouth
mingles fierce flame with every roar,
a heavy colossus with lightning in your veins,
you who will scatter in air the blinded dead,
I bless you. You are going to defend this city.

O cannon, I charge you:
     never turn your mouth upon us.
     Be silent in civil war,
but against the foreigner watch out. Just yesterday
you came from the forge, terrible and proud.
The women followed you. How handsome he is! they said.
Because the Cimbri[1] are out there. Their victories are such
that shame has been brought to us, and Paris signals
to the princes that she calls all people to witness.

The struggle awaits us; come, oh my strange son,
let us stand one beside the other, and make an exchange:
place, O black avenger, sovereign fighter,
your bronze in my heart,
     and take my soul within your brass.

O cannon, you will soon be on the ramparts.
Eight horses will drag you, your boxes
full of grapeshot jumping on the pavement.
From the middle of a crowd bursting into cheers,
you will go your lonely way,
     few among the crumbling hovels
     will take notice of your passage.
Take your haughty place at the large embrasures
where an indignant Paris stands, her saber raised.
There, never fall asleep or calm down.

I am one who hoped to heal all with austere indulgence;
since I have rumbled my complaints
     among the living, in the forum or from the heights in exile,
a sower of peace through the immensity of human war,
since towards the great goal where merciful God leads us,
I, sad or smiling, always have my finger raised,
since I, who have known mourning, am pensive now,
as much as one who loved the gospel and craved
     some union Biblical —
but you, ah, you who bear my name,
oh monster, you must become terrible!

For love becomes hatred in the presence of evil;
for the spirit-man cannot submit to the beast man,
and France cannot endure barbarism;
because the sublime ideal is the one great homeland;
and never was duty more obvious
to obstruct the overflowing wild flood,
and to put Paris, the Europe that she is transforming,
her people, under the shelter of an enormous defense.

For if this Teutonic king were not punished,
everything that man calls hope, progress, pity,
fraternity, would flee from the earth without joy;
for Caesar is the tiger and the people are the prey,
and whoever fights France attacks the future;
because we must raise, when we hear from out
the formidable shadow the neighing
of Attila’s horse and his vanguard of Huns,
around the human soul an unapproachable wall,
and Rome, to save the universe from nothingness,
must be a goddess, and Paris a giant!

This is why the cannons that the lyre gave birth to,
that the azure stanzas issued, must be
pointed, mouths gaping, above the ditch.
This is why a quivering thinker is forced
to use light for sinister things;
before kings, before evil and its ministers,
faced with the world’s great need to be saved.
He knows that after dreaming, he must fight.
He knows it is a necessary fight,
     to strike, to conquer, to dissolve,
and so, with a ray of dawn,
     he manufactures a thunderbolt.

---

[1] Cimbri. A Germanic tribe defeated by the Romans in 101 CE.

A Message to President Grant

U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant

 

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "December 1870." 

It matters when the United States takes the wrong side in a foreign conflict. It also matters when the United States declares neutrality. General Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States (1869 to 1877), sent to the Prussian king a message of benevolent neutrality at the start of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, in effect abandoning France to its fate. This is Victor Hugo’s outraged response, summoning up the ghosts of Franklin. Lincoln, John Brown, Washington, and the Polish military officer Kosciusko who helped the American revolution.

III

In this way, Americans, people inclined to prodigious efforts,

thus, land of peaceable Penn,

of fire-and-steam Fulton,

of Franklin the Prometheus,

in the living dawn of a new world,

oh great republic,

it is in your name that we take a sideways step

into the shadow!

 

Treason! Because Berlin wanted Paris destroyed!

If you are for light, do not encourage its opposite!

What is this? Has freedom become a renegade?

Is this why, coming on his frigate

Lafayette gave Rochambeau his hand?

When darkness rises, would you extinguish your torch?

What? Are you now saying, as some others say,

“Nothing is true but force.” On the end

of a long-pointed glave, a shining blade

seems to have dazzled everyone.

Bend the knee, the work of twenty centuries is wrong.

Progress is called a vile serpent —

see how it writhes in the mire —

and the idealistic people are now the selfish ones.

 

The new order decrees that

nothing definitive and absolute exists.

The master is everything; he is justice and truth.

And everything disappears: right, duty, freedom,

the future that shines before us; even Reason that led us,

divine wisdom and human wisdom,

dogma and book. Blank out Voltaire as well as Jesus,

once a German soldier puts his boot on it! —

You are so good at gallows when you forget yourselves,

casting the dawning world’s shadow

onto the world that has gone before.

 

Hanging John Brown, you taught us all a lesson

from another Golgotha on another horizon.

Ghost, untie the knot from your neck, come, oh righteous one,

come and whip this President with your august rope!

It is thanks to him that one day history,

mourning, will say with regret:

— France once rescued America, and forged

its sword, and lavished all for its deliverance,

and then, trembling reader,

America then turned to stab at France! —

 

Some savage, preferring to crawl and lie in wait,

some Huron, decorated with scalping knives,

might have made league

with this bloody leader, the King of Prussia.

Certainly, the uncivilized admire the Borusse.

It’s quite simple; he sees him as a fellow raider,

beastly, atrocious, as wild in his woods

as the Prussians in their forests.

 

To think that the man embodying

before Europe the sense of law,

the man enveloped in Columbia’s rays,

the man in whom a whole heroic world is alive,

that he now would throw himself face down

before the dreadful iron scepter

of old funeral ages,

that from the shadows he slaps Paris in the face

that he would deliver her august homeland to the emperor!

 

Let him mix it up with tyrants, murders, horror,

so that in this horrible and dark triumph it overwhelms her,

that in this bed of shame he ravished this virgin,

that he shows to the universe, on a filthy chariot,

America kissing the heel of Caesar ֫—

Oh! it makes all the great tombs shake!

 

It stirs, at the bottom of the pale catacombs,

the bones of the proud victors and the mighty vanquished!

A quivering Kosciusko wakes Spartacus;

and Madison stands and Jefferson stands —

Jackson raises both hands to block this hideous dream —

Dishonor! shouts Adams; and Lincoln rises, too,

amazed and bleeding, as on the day he was murdered.

 

Be indignant, great people. O supreme nation,

you know with what tender and filial heart I love you.

America, I cry. Oh! painful affront!

She still only had a halo’s figment on her brow.

Her starry, sidereal flag dazzled history.

Washington, galloping on his horse of glory,

had spattered the folds with sparks

of freedom’s standard, witness to duties accomplished,

and, so that from every shadow he dissipates the veils,

had superbly seeded it with stars.

 

This illustrious banner is obscured, alas!

I weep ... — Ah! be cursed, you wretch who mixes

atop the proud pavilion that a wind from heaven shakes

into the drops of light a stain of mud!

 

 

At the Orchid Pavilion

 

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Lantingji Xu, “Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion” by Wang Xizhi (303-361 CE, Jin Dynasty)

In fourth century China, the Jin emperor presided over a picnic of poets in which all sat alongside a gentle stream. Wine cups were placed on large leaves and dropped into the stream. Any time a wine cup came within reach of a poet, he was required to take it up and drink it, and/or write a poem on the spot. My friend Ping Geng obtained for me a ceramic replica of one of the little cups used at this famous poetry gathering. The event yielded an anthology and here is my adaptation of the dedicatory poem. The artwork depicts the poets idling along the stream-bank.

The great Jin rules at the world’s center
(may it always be so), and this late spring,
in the ninth year of the Yonghe Emperor

we have gathered at the Orchid Pavilion,
in the cool north of Kauiji Mountain
for the ritual of purification, as always

the Literati gather, ink-pot and brush
as ready as a bannerman’s weapon.
Mistake not the power of these seated men.

We have climbed the steep hills
to reach this mountain slope. The woods
are dense with shadowing pines.

 The slender bamboo is emerging
and the flowing stream has swollen
with the rush of melting snow

into an artificial rivulet that bends
and turns across a levelled field
where we spread out in groups

so that each poet’s arm can reach
to touch the limpid waters
on which a broad leaf boat

carries an oblong wine-cup.
If one such vessel comes your way
you are compelled to take it,

if not, you must write a poem.
If excellent, the emperor applauds;
if not, the waters carry it off.

Although no music wafts
among the pine trees, winds
at work on fervent blossoms

and the sweet harmonies of words
suffice to make us happy. Hearts
rise in a bell-symphony of joy.

The sky is free of clouds.
The air is fresh, no hint of smoke.
The breeze is moderate and cool.

Above us, hidden in blue
a billion stars burn ever on.
Among us all, our poems are few,

Although they number tens
of thousands by now. Our eyes
harvest the landscape for images.

Too quick a lifetime passes
when one is among friends,
not years enough! Not years Enough!

We have each our own way with words,
our chambers and all the things in them.
What one collects, another scorns,

Yet out of such diversity there comes
the pleasures and satisfactions
with which we regale one another.

How quickly, alas, this all may pass’
as we grown old, our young desires
seem weary or over-sated;

What once we trafficked in
seems shallow now. We call
the auctioneer to clear things out.

And trailing ever behind us,
the unacknowledged guest,
is grief, its shadow ever-growing.

Long life, short life,
the better lived, the sooner
it seems to come to calamity.

Alas, the ancients knew best:
The only two ultimate things
are the birth that brought you

And the death that takes you away.
Alas that it must be so! Far back
into the ancient works, the same lament.

It saddens me that the worthy dead
came up with no answer for me.
I cannot express how sad this is.

It is absurd to say that death
makes all life meaningless.
Look! One more leaf has fallen!

Which one? Which one? Oh who can tell?
To live long is surely better
than to have scarcely lived at all,
 

To read and weep, one hand
unrolling the scroll, the other
outlining the share of each character:
 

Is this not how one lives
in more than one lifetime
inside the minds of the departed?

And just as we read them,
some future reader
will stumble upon these words

And say, “That poet. I think
I know him. Our minds are one.
I might have been him, he, me.

How many poets are here today?
How many brushes at work,
how many completed verses?

Oh, gather them up? All of them!
Let he who made the rivulet
on which the wine cups float,

Extend it beyond our sight,
to carry gently downward
all of our torments and doubts

Into the far-off river, touched
by swallows and dragonflies,
into the great sea of eternity.