The Two Monuments

 

The National government from Versailles surrounds and bombards Paris. The rebellious Paris Commune threatens to destroy the Arc de Triomphe and the Napoleon column at the Vendôme. Hugo writes in defense of the two national monuments, and protests the civil war. The Commune later decides to defend the Arch and place cannons on its top, making it a primary target for the incoming army. The Napoleon column is toppled by the Commune.

THE TWO MONUMENTS

by Brett Rutherford

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

1

People, this century stood witness
to your superhuman works. Your hands
kneaded Europe like a pliant dough,
which swallowed up the nothingness
of scepters, and folded in the crowns,
making and unmaking throned lands.
With each of your steps, the speed
of change accelerated. You strode,
sowing with both hands the seeds
of new ideas that frightened the globe.
Your legions pushed overflowing waves
of progress, swelling so high they swept
one peak to another, unstoppable.

The Revolution plowed the row;
one hand sowed Danton in Germany,
the other, Voltaire in Spain.
Your glory, O people, walked with dawn
and day rose up wherever you passed.
Just as they once said in awe, “The Greeks!”
they now acknowledged, breathless, “The French!”

Where evil fed on vice, and horror on hell,
you smote the Middle Ages dead. As by
and earthquake the Holy Office was riven.
Superb, you fought against all harmful things.
Night ran off blinded by your bright clarity.
For once, the entire planet was bathed in light
(o to be free of kings and torturers!).

While you ascended your star-led path,
the desperate admired you, even when you failed.
Sometimes, soaring, you dared the distance,
so that even the galaxies were dazzled
when, for twenty years, from Tagus to Elbe,
and from the Nile to Adige, you were
the prodigy. Then everything vanished —
ah, History, remember, names graven here,
the giant leader who compelled a titan people.

The arch of victory, the pillar of power —
these are two monuments of the people’s glory.
Both are yourself, o sovereign people.
[The one, in granite, was three decades’ labor
to honor the armies of Revolution and Empire,
the names of warriors and battles solemnly inscribed;
the other in memory of Austerlitz, where France
brought Austria and Russia to their knees.
The column’s winding bronze bas-reliefs
were made from enemy cannons, melted down.]

It is good to be reminded, passing by,
that we were once a victorious nation.
Oh, these two monuments, feared
by a hostile Europe, we must protect!
Both day and night we must watch over them,
assured against harm by our somber affections.
Each is a witness from a better age;
     each is in spirit an avenger.

Do we not need more than ever now
this haughty marble, this haughty metal?
We draw from them the ardor to punish.
Not only by name but by sight as well
we watch with a melancholy eye for those,
the veterans, Sons of the Republic.

For the hour of falling is a time for pride;
defeat increases, as the people mourn,
the resplendence of these two monuments;
their fiery glow gives warmth to our souls;
when great things still stand,
     the small are comforted.

We will internalize these monuments —
behold the arch in me, the column! —
but still we must make them eternal, too.
They were built by those whose work,
     extraordinary, lives on.
Those powerful dead once thundered by us.
The drum-beat of their march is echoing still.

Those living today, tenebrous and pale,
are less like beings of light than things of the grave.
Listen! Someone breaks up the pavement there.
The pick-axe shatters the curfew silence. Listen!
A bomb! Does it go off of its own accord?
No! Someone arrives to do the demolishing.
And who is that, Paris? Why, Paris itself!!

All I can do is shudder, a thinker forlorn,
like old King Lear addressing, admonishing
the storm that roars around his head.
What frightening signs! Is it the end of days?
Do they mean to abort the future?
How far can the murder of posterity go?
Does this century die because the birth
of the Nineteen Hundreds was averted?
Topple a calendar, not a column!

Like Lear, we swoon in vertigo.
What force has come to prey on Paris?
One power divides the city in two.
    the other strikes it dead,
thus one Sahara sandstorm pummels
     another, each with a will to strike,
each with a destroying power.

O People, choose! Both kinds of chaos
    are wrong, the firmament above
in tyrant rage, the trembling earth
     pulling us down to rubble.

It’s one or the other, two baleful foes.
One has the force of tradition behind it,
     and the name of the law,
the other a sense of indomitable right.
Versaille has the aura of bells and parishes,
Paris the Commune’s light and clamor,
yet over and beyond these two contenders
     there is only one France.
Right now, when a consoling shoulder
     is what everyone needs,
is this the time to sink to cannibal rage?
Who watches while we fight one another?

O fratricide! On one side all the frenzy
of grapeshot, mortars, bombs, and cannons,
on the other, the wild melee of vandals.
Fleeing the grind of Carybdis,
     one is smitten by Scylla,
two dooms rolling down cobblestone alleys.

(more to come)...

The Exiles

 by Brett Rutherford

The sun is lost.
The planets just tag along.
No one knows where
this all will end.
The exile’s lot:
to eat odd food,
to be shouted at
in tongues as strange
as animal calls,
to dwell unwelcome
where even the sky
is unfamiliar.
Blood moon, boxed clouds,
whirlwinds menacing,
alien insects
and unpronounceable
afflictions.
A shaken fist, a howl
as a crowd gathers
with torches menacing.
Only a few,
exiles already
in their own minds,
extend a hand in welcome.

A Birthday

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.

 

 

 

While the Sea Roars

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.

They Rise, to Fall Again

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.

Stay Back!

 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.

The Room

 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.