by Brett Rutherford
The dawn arrives.
I turn the key
of the sun’s lock-box.
The day is sprung.
Not just any, but one.
Clouds roll
at ox-cart speed,
the flower leans and droops
at interrupted beams.
Tornadoes threaten;
winds have their way.
Six sixties
and five
of these days ago
the same people had
a slight-less numbered
birthday cake.
For them the
world
keeps spinning on;
they do not fear
the candle-snuff night
amid the merriment
of clanging bells.
by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “April 1871”
While the sea roars and the waves roll,
and on the horizon tumults collapse
upon themselves in warfare wild,
one watchman, the poet, sits bound
as though imprisoned there, atop
the tower of his agony and exile.
One can watch chaos in its endless
variety, and never be tired of it,
yet what he craves is for harmony
to finally takes its turn, the still calm
when wind and tide are in perfect balance.
In dark times, he has been here before,
doomed by the earth’s curve to never see
the place of his birth and of his triumphs;
but then, in times much like the ones
we suffer now, the pensive poet sought
the company of men to disarm them,
to pour out to them his heart;
he loved the vanquished, but no hate
for the victor poisoned his days.
Armies heard his pleas, and paused.
When he petitioned, sometimes
the cities heeded, mellowing.
When the living walked blind
to the civil war’s drumbeat, his lines
called some back from the brink of murder,
just from the simple clarity of truth
he mustered as his sword and armor,
and this solitary man, aged now
beyond his days with grief and shock,
battered by the inexorable, still sought
to be the messenger of peace.
If one Prometheus complains
for all except himself, who hears?
“When does inflicted pain suffice
to call itself a surfeit? What drop
of shed blood is the penultimate
for the soul sickens
at the next sacrifice?
If you are tired, why not be good
instead of gathering spite
for tomorrow’s manhunt?
If on this rock he calls to everyone,
Peace! Pity! Grace! — who hears?
He knows his duty. To stay, not leap,
to channel the voice within him always,
to be the humble bulrush that floats
atop a tidal wave, held up
by heart that cannot stop its beating.
by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, April 1871
VII
Oh you, who have ascended now
and call yourself master — I pity you.
Ferocious and vile, wicked and cowardly,
from those you hold in your power’s grasp
you shall receive the stunning blow,
the hangman’s noose, or disembowelment.
The future is made on the anvil of the present,
and the spider's web shall catch its maker.
When those masked figures come for you
amid a crowd of veiled witnesses, fists
shaking in rebuke against your tyranny;
if you could see, unmasked, unveiled,
your executioners, you would know them all —
trembling and naked and crucified,
they are your undying victims,
the faults of your turbulent yesteryears.
You thought you had immunity?
Now drink, drink up, you monster,
the vomit of murder and inebriation,
the bile of all our success and glory,
this cup you will now be forced to drain!
You stifled within you the horror
one ought to feel on inflicting harm,
the enmity and rage of the crowd
upon whose bodies your carriage rolled,
the “others” who did not count as men.
Pitying none, there is no pity left.
You counted coins to balance debt,
but the accumulated deficit of blood
from the innocent is a debit, too.
“No one will know,” you told yourself;
now No One stands before you with an axe.
Each larceny you carried out
to live like a king or an Olympian,
will be reversed upon you, and dust
shall be the last bed you know.
Each furious slander that came from you
will be hurled invective upon your head.
The lightning that falls upon you
is a discharge of spite from your own electrodes.
Fate’s final lesson is a bitter one:
that crime is also its own punishment.
by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “April 1871”
VI.
Stay back! There is a solitude
so deep that other solitudes are lost in it.
In such a place thing gloomy thinker sits.
The calm mind whose placid rivers
were serious attitudes, is stricken.
One too many indignant flashes
flew from his eye and came back to fell him.
The rim of darkness is beyond his reach;
he is no longer free. The anger
inside him is like a coiled serpent.
He is the sinister captive of hatred.
He, who once soothed others,
a light as they trekked to Gehenna;
he, whose own life expanded out
in waves of loving; he, the comforter,
is now the one who howls out curses!
He thought he had transcended suffering,
which, after all, afflicts mankind
wherever it clings to this hurtling world,
but now he feels the misery of France —
dungeons and barricades and firing squads! —
with a jab at his heart he realizes
one place is more sacred to him than all others,
his homeland, and dear, even to a heart
that beat for every one and all; so that
even the wise man’s soul is sometimes bitter.
When the mother bleeds, the man
becomes the boy again.
Of course, this despair is not eternal.
Even the longest eclipse must pass;
his eyes will make out again
the august and forgiving rays of dawn.
His stooped and sobbing form will rise
after the apocalypse of infamy.
Slowly on his forehead that beam
of white light that God grants
to the great seekers, will shine,
the white light that beams down
softer and more diffuse, perhaps,
as Hope to man, a star above
the abyss, atop the silhouette
of the menacing peak, above the wall
that marks off the penal colony.
It is the rebirth of peace for all.
People might even come to love
one another at last.
Stay back! His meditation is desolate,
and, seeing you, he is prone to scold.
The affront of gloom adds to his majesty —
you might think it comes with genius.
Oh, what blazes of infinite fury
pass through his shivering limbs. He is wild;
he looks at one as though to threaten all
with fists that only beat upon himself.
Begone, all thoughts of union, joy,
and utter not a word of love to him.
Swans grace our world in peace,
while vultures are drawn to the battlefields.
Over him arrowing, those birds of death
tell him the war is on every side.
Leave him in peace to mourn his homeland.
Sometimes a stanza, bruised and angry,
escapes him, but then he is still,
stunted from epic, to epigram, to shout,
no, even to less, an exclamation point!
Is he bored? Empty, he gazes on nothing.
The lamps of his orbs have dimmed; he treads
a path on which even monsters avoid him,
appalled by the shaking of his animal mane.
He seems like a wandering specter, no lair
or cave or broken tomb can hold him.
His bare feet tread the rocky way
to the bottom of despair’s ravine.
Grief in the starless night, grief
in gray skies without a trace of blue,
Europe in irons, in place of France
the great cold hand of universal death.
Stay back! Down where he meditates
in that Hades where light perishes,
in that Tartarus where nothingness
raises its smiting hand in triumph,
the future is undone, glory
becomes a word without meaning.
The dictionaries shrink as words
like “faith” and “honor” vanish
as Nothingness subsumes the Real.
Now human degradation rules
in the merry erasure of history,
as blame becomes a great-coat
and all ships float on a sea of cowardice.
He feels the shame of History
as though he had authored it;
he, more and more, bears witness
to horrors with a wounded look.
Stay back! For though one might dare,
out of pity or compassion, to reach
for thorn that throbs and bleeds
as he limps along, he is still
when all is said and done, a lion.
by Brett Rutherford
Easiest job in the world.
No marksman, he:
like a deer-hunt it was,
from the comfort
of an office, a blind
in which you sat and waited
for the prey to come by.
The peep-hole,
with its fish-eye lens
showed everything.
The far door would open.
The suspect was ushered in,
a cigarette in hand.
He would pace and pace
until the smoking butt
was about to burn his fingers.
If he was one of those
aristocrat class enemies
he would fling the butt
heedlessly to the tiled floor.
If he was a working man
he’d look for an ashtray
or a decent concealment
of his vile habit’s trash.
There, next to the chair,
was the ashtray. Who
could miss it? Use it,
fool. And now, sit down.
Some fools would go back
to their miserable pacing;
finding no clock to check,
a class enemy would reach
for the pocket watch
he used to own, a gesture
the watcher had learned to recognize.
The chair, you fool! Sit down!
It is the only piece of furniture
in the wood-paneled room.
It beckons the suspect’s tired
feet, his aching back. With
nothing else to do but wait,
someone has been kind enough
to make the waiting bearable.
All would be straightened out.
The suspect would sigh and shrug.
You could almost hear his thoughts,
how he was taken by error.
A name spelled the same as his,
but certainly not him; the wrong
address when the Black Maria
bagged him and carried him here.
He had his Party membership
card close to his breast, at worst
it was a false accusation
that could be explained away,
a jilted lover, or some
professional jealousy.
The suspect might even
rehearse his innocence,
like an actor going over
a Shakespeare soliloquy.
He would mumble the lines
he would use on the magistrate.
No torture need come,
since he would tell them everything
they might need to know.
Each peep-hole check
showed the suspect tiring.
The chair, you fool!
Take a rest, now. Just sit.
There, he has done it.
Good thing it was not a woman,
just some fool in a greasy cardigan.
Now, softly, to slide
the wood panel aside.
There, as clear as day
the back of his head,
unshorn curls
in need of a haircut,
a dirty neck, collar
worn out and yellowed.
He raises the tool
of his daily trade:
the loaded revolver.
One click, one shot,
and all is over.
A moan, a gurgle,
and the seated fool
topples forward, face
to the clean tiles.
He pushes a button.
A bell rings. Men drag
the corpse away.
Then, the char-lady
comes in and does her work,
the blood, the bullet,
and bits of brain sopped up
in the Gorgon-head mop
on the end of the broomstick.
It was pay-day, and much
vodka awaited him. He’d joke
with the mop-lady and each
would lie about their labors:
he, a clerk; she, stenographer.
Their paths would never cross
except in bar and bedroom.
Some days they’d be tired
if there were many suspects
to process and tend to,
but the pay was the same.
Less or more, no matter.
The work goes on
and the Leader knows best.
by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “April 1871”
Some words which I believe
are as straight as arrows:
Reason, Progress, Honor and Loyalty,
Duties and Rights.
One does not reach the truth
by round-about.
Be fair and just, and thus
one serves the republic;
what one owes her is equity for all.
No anger need be on display:
no one is just if he is not gentle, too.
Our Revolution is a sovereign;
the people, prodigious fighters,
drag the past,
pushing it foot by foot to the abyss.
So it must be. But here in the shade
that shelters me I honor
no other majesty than you,
my Conscience.
This is my faith. My candor comes
from life’s experience.
Even if I have been made
to strike you down,
I will not break you.
If I draw a circle to declare my right,
the compass that draws the circle
is made of others’ rights,
so that between my enemies and me
the same rules apply.
If I see them imprisoned,
I do not feel free.
If I had done to them
what they have done to me,
I would wear out my knees
imploring pardon.
I will never say, “Citizens,
the principles we stood for
no long apply to our conduct;
we need only pretend
to honor righteousness
while doing the opposite;
although me know better,
we must do what is expedient.”
I will not pick the brains
for the impure thoughts of Jesuits
who say it is sometimes fine
to disregard the facts —
I know the price one pays
for such dissimulations.
I will never say, “This traitor deserves
as much by his acts
as by his own perversity,
that I should strike him down.”
If I do this, his crime, like leprosy,
communicates to me, and I,
becoming the same man as him,
transmute his past crime
into my virtue of today.
No! What I was yesterday,
not judge, not
summary executioner,
let me still be that man tomorrow.
I could not hold a crime in my hand,
like a spent shell, or an unexploded bomb,
and say to myself, “This crime
was their projectile, an infamy to them.
But now I find it useful. I hurl it back;
having been struck, I strike.
I say again, “No!”
Who, having been touched
by even a whiff of prophecy,
could become a sophist?
If there is triumph at the end of this,
how can it not also be defeat?
I intend to be the same person,
and having lived a lot,
I see the victor and vanquished bound
to me by common faith.
I have no need for God to warn me,
so why should you. Just as two suns
float not in the bloodied sky, neither
are there two Justices, one for us,
and the other to me meted out.
Look at the fallen foes, freedom,
to them, is just the same as for us.
The same light shines clear upon us all.
Extinguishing the rights of others,
we extinguish our own stars.
I want, if I cannot do any good
after so many disasters, at least to do no harm.
Let kings act as chimeras,
doing what they will
and without explanation;
the people have always the Ideal.
What is this I hear now? “Banish this one!”
“Throw that one into the Bastille!”
Never! How can you now declare
that prisons and gates and bars and jailers,
or the doom of dark exile,
having been bad for us,
are suitable for them?
Who would take upon himself the crime
of driving someone away from his homeland?
A remnant of my own hurricane
makes my hair shiver.
Can you understand from where I speak?
Formerly outcast, I will not break the bounds
of what is just and honest. I paid
with twenty years of exile for this right
to oppose the vengeful furies
with a solitary refusal.
I close my soul to blind anger.
When I think of the dungeons sinister,
the bolts and chains, offered as punishment
to even my enemy, I love him instead.
I would give asylum even to one
who sought to banish me
and forbid my books,
which fortitude alone
is a gift of my own suffering.
How can I serve you, my people,
in this fatal century?
The spirit of Freedom does not stir or blink
as I am smashed to bits before her.
Well, then, I am willing to renounce everything,
my native soil, my childhood home, my nest,
the graves of those I loved, and who loved me,
this blue sky of France where doves fly,
Paris itself, sublime field where I harvested,
the homeland, the paternal roof —
all happiness, even that! —
But I intend to remain pure,
without stain, even if powerless.
I will not surrender the sovereign right
of innocence.
If I were Jesus Christ,
would I not rescue Judas?
If revenge is at the table,
I will not dine.
Who punishes much, indulges much,
and I would come to pity each tortured Cain.
No, I do not oppress! I will never kill!
April 1871. The Paris Commune has seized power in Paris and is arming the city against the regular French government in Versailles. Paris feels itself betrayed, for while it never surrendered to the Prussians, the new government signed a shameful armistice and royalists will almost certainly be back in power with all their reactionary repressions. While the Prussian Army occupied Paris for only a single day and departed without looting or destruction, Paris is now in a state of civil war. The Commune demands that all able-bodied men enlist in the coming struggle between the national government and the city of Paris. The French are now fighting one another. Hugo publishes this poem in the newspaper Le Rappel, protesting the coming horrors.
IV
A CRY FROM AFAR
by Brett Rutherford
Adapted and translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “April 1871”
Just where is all this taking us?
As this great country crumbles
at every step they take,
can they not feel it happening?
Someone needs punishing —
why punish all of Paris?
The city just wants to be free.
The world hangs in the balance
and Paris is on the scale,
a trembling equilibrium.
We have become the abyss
in which the future broods.
Have we not hurled enough
into the Ocean already?
The bottom of the sea
cannot be punished more
than Europe, which suffers blows
with France at its heart.
Insane combatants,
what do you want?
Set fire to the wheat that feeds you,
cut down with bayonets
the figures of Honor, Reason, Hope!
What have we come to? Enemies
on both sides uttering
the sacred name of France!
Stop it! Each step you take
leaves only weeping in its wake.
French cannons fire
against French targets.
Obeying the command to attack,
you sow death ahead of you
and reap shame behind.
After the double blows of September
and February (defeat
and a dishonored armistice),
we no long know who we are.
We pour out and mix on the paving-stones
the blood of peasants
the blood of workers;
it runs through the streets like rain
cascades from roof and culvert —
even the fountains run red!
It is as incomprehensible to me
as if the Latins turned on Rome
or the Greeks sacked Athens.
In whose name, I dare to ask,
does this slaughter continue?
The priest who says God wants this, lies.
You seem to fight whichever way
the wind is turning. How is this?
No lucid moments guide you,
or give you pause to take account.
For killing your own brother
you find yourself a hero.
Horror! Abasement, blame,
the affronts against humanity
darken the sky and shadow your brows.
What you mistake for a flag,
shroud-black, shroud-white, up there
above your temple of triumph:
Look again! It is only a rag
hung over the bone-yard ossuary.
Amid your downfall, regard it
carefully, the flag of mourning,
the emblem of Prussia.
This insolent cloth has wrapped around you,
and made you its mummy.
You cannot make it out
as it darkly enfolds you,
like Egypt lording it over the Hebrews,
heavy and sinister, a dark glory.
It has come to your house. It reigns.
Civil war, sad once after Austerlitz,
and now, after Sedan’s defeat, so vile!
What hideous adventure,
gambling your own homeland
and its future with a roll of dice.
Have you gone made, to pitch a tent
on your own ramparts, to fight again,
O Paris, you wounded lion
with a bloody spear still in your side.
Warriors with unhealed wounds,
you sally forth to bruise and tear
the stitches from one another.
In that woman darkly bleeding
in the doorway you march on by,
do you not see your own mother?
That widow and child without support,
those workers fainting for lack of bread,
the sum and yield of all the terrible
conditions of war: what are they
to you, the ever-more implacable
rhetorician, soldier, and self-styled Tribune?
You repair nothing,
and make all things the worse.
Where a beacon is needed,
you dig an abyss.
From both sides the same despicable
fanfare sounds, the cry from afar
comes in one common tongue:
come, War — come, Death.
Whose death is demanded?
The answer: Cain.
That some who bowed before Prussia
now turn a haughty face to France,
the deep skies look down in shame.
I call disgrace and infamy upon
the kind of man, whoever they may be,
who safely sit in shadows, on murder’s
bulwark, rising themselves on pedestals
atop the public’s misfortune, whose puffed
cheeks blow out a universal contagion,
imposing a fatal duel on the indignant
people, on the servile rank-and-file,
lighting the hot brands of civil war. Disgrace
on those who put the undying city
in prison yet again (as if starvation
had not been enough!), trampling all rights,
France self-assassinating its own spirit,
Paris dead, its star gone out from the heavens.
And who would be so base as not to shudder
as the real enemy’s laughter bursts out around us?
