The Innocents

by Brett Rutherford

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

 

XVIII

But still, we have the children! Does Fate,
going about its implacable business, pause
to listen to the murmur of these blossoming souls?
When, cheerfully, the child runs forth,
does the worried prayer that follows him
speak to anyone at all? Does Destiny amend
its thoughts, when a sweet child whispers,
of the day’s delight that awaits her?

 

Oh! What a shadow! Both sing, two
fragile heads lean one upon the other,
where floats the glow of their made-up
celebrations. Their games
reflect a better paradise
than any a weary nurse can imagine.

 

At each awakening, a child
has a bright heart as new as morning.

Their innocence is primed for joy,
    their eyes intent for surprises,
and just as the bird who chirps on a branch,
or the star that seems new-hatched
     at one of the black horizons,
they do not worry themselves
     about what their elders might do,
for their business and their adventures
is all of great nature blossoming.

 

“Look what I found,” they delight in saying.
They ask nothing of any god but sunlight.
So long as some vermilion ray
     beams through diaphanous hands
     to warm up their little fingers,
they are content!
“And what does little Jeanne desire today?” I ask.

She need not answer; she points
to where the cedars arch up to frame
the bluest of blue in the heavens.

A Verb's Past Participle

by Brett Rutherford

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

 

People have, in their minds, an exaggerated sense of the value, the abilities, the importance of the national guard ... My God, you have seen the kepi [cap] of Mr. Victor Hugo which symbolized this situation.

(General Trochu at the National Assembly — June 14, 1871.)

 

You, Trochu,
     more of a past participle than an active verb,
a man whose virtues could not be counted
     because they amounted to zero.
I am told you are a brave, and honest,
     and pious soldier, as modest
as any nobody, a good eye
     over an empty cannon, a man
a great perspective,
     too many perspectives, in fact,
a man of courage
     but with such Christian virtues
that you can serve both masters
by doing nothing whatsoever
and yet remain a man of your word —
I hope I am doing you justice
     by this little conjugation,
as you bow to the nation
     while creeping at Mass
across the cathedral stones,
you figure of speech —
well, what do you want from me?
Why aim this offensive barb my way —

to give the Prussians pleasure?

 

Amid the German siege,
and what felt like a Russian winter.
I was, I admit, no more
than an unarmed old man,
honored to be in Paris
    locked up like everyone
     with the Prussians on every side.

Sometimes I took advantage
    when it was dark enough
     to evade the grapeshot,
to climb the great wall
     and greet our defenders,
to be able to say “Present!”
     though not a Fighter.
At seventy, I may have been
     good for nothing,
     but I did not capitulate.

 

The laurels in your hand

     turn into nettles.

What the hell, it’s against me
     that you turn your ire?

You led in such a miserly way
     when we were starving!
Having spent so few missiles,
     did you hoard them for me?
You couldn’t be bothered
     to cross the Marne’s peninsula,
so now you take aim at me?
For what? I left you alone.
Why does blue cloth
     on my poor white head
offend you? Does my kepi
     molest your rosary?

 

You poor, unhappy creature!

Five months of cold and hunger went by.
We stared at the abyss. We never
bothered you, united and confident
even as we hid in cellars, quivering.
You are a great general, if you say so,
but when we have to run into battle,
go out to sea, or push a whole army
into the enemy fire, who sounds the charge?
I prefer the little drum of a Barra.

 

Think of Garibaldi who came from Caprera,

think of Kléber in Cairo, of Manin in Venice,

and just calm down. Great Paris dies

because you lack, not heart, but faith.

Your legacy will be a bitter one. They’ll say
France, thanks to him, went lame.

In those great days, amid the solemn anguish
this bleeding, wounded country,
     which in its heart never fell,
marched for Gambetta out there,
and limped with Trochu back here.

 

If you are a verb, I spell you out:
“has been” just gets it right.

A Madness Came Over Us

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

[This poem refers to few actual events. It is written in the middle of the terrible reprisals against French people perceived to have been, or to have been allied with, the defeated Communards. Thousands of people were rounded up and executed, and many others were arrested, imprisoned, or exiled to penal colonies. Hugo would be involved in a number of appeals for amnesty, and continued to plead for a policy of no reprisals. This troubled poem should be read, not as a political statement, but as a poet's general deliberations on how the madness of civil war comes to pass, the extent to which individuals are to blame, the need to document and "accuse" FACTS rather than people. It ends with a gloomy speculation that even worse forces of history were hatching that would sweep people away in more waves of senseless violence. Considering the future history of Europe, we can see his dreads as justified. — BR]

 

XVI

Concerning this somber history,
I wish to condemn no one.
The winner always wins, his goal
and will prevails, and yet
he is dragged along by his victory.

Civil war comes, and mourning,
and draped in black as he is
the victor just fresh from triumph
stumbles and loses his footing — lo!

the inky-black waters that swallows
him, we call success; he chokes
at the very thought of more glory
if it feels and tastes like this.

 

This is why I pity them all,
martyrs and executioners alike.

Alas! woe to the orphan-makers!

Misfortune! misfortune
to the widow-makers, woe upon woe!

 

Woe when the rivers run red
with frightful carnage, and when

defiling their beds with a torrential flood,

the blood of man flows
where the rain once fell!
The sky is incarnadine.

Faced with a dead man,
a double fear distresses me:

I pity the killer as much as the corpse.

 

The dead man holds the living one
immobile in his rigid hand. He can flee,
but his victim follows along.
Taking one path to evade the phantom
he comes face to face with it again.
It has no eyes, but ever it knows his name.
Turning up the dead as though to kill
a second time, his blows are in vain.

The night and drugged sleep
     do not remove it;
stand on dawns cliff and wait for it,
    and hurl it to the rocks below,
          yet still it comes;
lose him in drink and boredom,
place a thick shadow of thinking
about nothing whatsoever, and yet
the dead shadow rises up
between his hand and the bread
he reaches for. The skeleton’s lips
come in between him and anyone
he intends to caress. The crime
has a life of it own and the dead
are its haggard puppets. Eyes shut,
the unsinkable specter flashes on
no matter how dark the room.

 

***

A cruel cross-bow extends across the heavens,
and we are all of us its target. The flying bolt
aims one day for this man, the next
for another. The winner has no respite
when, seeing another fall, he knows
another arrow will soon descend.
His heart feels death
     before the arrow takes him;
he fears the event
    of which he is the minister.

Each coming hour tolls
     with a dull series
          of sinister thuds —
does one know his penultimate
moment when it comes? —

should he hurry on, or wait,
for, quickening his pace,
does he go anyway to meet the arrow
at the point of its fated descent?
Oh, yes, he has his Victory.
     It walls him in.

 

One day in his turn, caught up
in the trap of things he made,
he shall run for his life
amid an esplanade of turned backs,
    a slide of spit, fists raised
          against him, the flags
that hailed him torn now
to pad a flaming torch.
They will tell him, “Go!”
He will cross the border by night,
evading the wax-sealed warrant,
and stumbling from the forest
find only one door open — mine!

 

***

 

To the useless thinker
     dreams come, and in
those dreams, truth trumpets out:
No one is guilty.

Only from such a dark and plummeting vision
can we glimpse what truly lies

at the bottom of the human abyss.

 

The next century up
     will not be a pretty one.

It rumbles and swells in stinging vats
the way lava foams at the mouths of Vesuvius.

Who is behind this chaos?
     Who wishes Man so much ill?
I cannot pretend to know —
no one is up there handing out tablets.

Thunderbolts roar, eagles fly by;

 

everything we saw in this Terrible Year
was done between the claws of unknown,
     hideous, and necessary scourges;
they rushed like a flock of birds.
The heart’s deep blood,
     down to the marrow of the bones,
the whole of mankind trembled
as the dark swarm of new facts
    (the shock-news of deeds and actions)
split open the clouds
     and vomited disasters.

 

And as all the calamities fell
     upon our battered brows,
we recognized the evil
     from which we suffer,
the formidable mass of all the poor,

     the penned-in, downtrodden ones
let their appetites roar out.
Yet some of us thought:
if there is something they merely wish for,
let them strive on, and hear them out
— they will tire of it — distractions
are easy to arrange, and holidays —
it if occurred to anyone
that they howled from starvation,
that thought was soon put aside.

Haven’t we all suffered enough?

 

So what really happened
     during this incredible time?

The furious shocks we could all see and hear;
     the subtle venoms ran underground.

Why did these winds blow? Where did they come from?

Why these jets of flame
     that keep on crushing the huddled crowd?

Why did we suddenly perceive
     the gulf that separated low from high?

Crimes were committed, senseless and violent:

     yet we are innocent.

 

Revolutions sometimes shed blood,

and when their will to win is unleashed,

their formidable passion surmounts all reason
and flaming rampant,
cannot be distinguished from hatred.

 

Let us maintain, let us maintain
     the sacred principles;
but when hearts are led astray by a tempest,
when they blow on us like ashes,
      to the depths of the dark problem
          we must know how to come back down.

Man suffers, the bottomless abyss
acts as though it had a will
of its own; the hurricanes themselves
are the true scoundrels,
     the only true criminals.

 

Is the drunkard permitted a stay
     if he does not remember things said,
things done in the heat of insult and passion?
What of the citizen turned madman
    who comes to his senses
          amid the carnage
to find his knife-hand in a brother’s heart?

 

Can we banish the storm that pulled us under
to its own Devil’s Island? Should we all go off
to the jungles of Guyana
     until our brains cool down?

No, we are better than this. Hyenas have not
possessed us. Our neighbors have not
been transformed into cannibals or bandits.
It is not a matter of weaker wills
    against strong ones. The fury
of one fatal wind can carry us all away
and tear away the anchor of human conscience.

 

Does the man whom the wild sea shook

get charged for the flood that toyed with him?

Can one be both the vulture and the prey?

Although I think I know what struck us,

although I feel merciful towards the unknown,

I say now, that we must accuse facts only.

Facts are what they are;
     the judgment of history
     an implacable engine
          that nothing disconcerts.

 

But should we therefore fear the future?

Of course, we have to consider.
     Trembling does us no good.

Be sure of it: this curtain of destiny

thickened by enigma, this deformed ocean

where the human soul floats,

the vast obscurity of the whole phenomenon,

this world in need of a child
     whose crayons sketch out
          the way through chaos,

these ideals we held aloft
     that came back to us as scourges,

these riots that issued forth with song
     that always miss their purpose,

all this terror, yes, out of a kernel of hope.

 

The frosty morning dismays the horizon;

sometimes the day begins

with such a chill

that the rising sun seems like a dark attack.

 

A flower is suspended there,
     the stinging thorn, its price.
Amid blue mountaintops I tread
     on a path of anguish.
Does not all life begin
     by tearing open someone’s
belly?  The best we can know
     is august suffering.

Each wave of the unknown
confuses with its livid tint;
only much later, as though
a series of veils had lifted

comes clarity. And what it shows
seems some arcane geometry
a thousand times folded in.
All things, all places, and all
at one time, astonishing!
Yet it is hideous to see
beneath the shadows of the present,
the evils of tomorrow
     already pregnant there.
One dreads the coming day,
     a superhuman Hell.

 

Down in some wormhole obscure,
something wicked germinates.
Rising, it will lure the young,
     appalling their parents.
Its terrifying night will blot
the azure sky above, as rays
emit from the darkly glowing egg.

 

Oh, doom I see! This gloomy larva
     will grow its own wings,
a barely-visible specter
     in the depth of eternal shadow.

 

Tomorrow is that black embryo
    curled up inside Today.
I dread it even as I know
     it has no choice but to be.
It crawls at first. It waits
     for its wings to form.

Scant need of them, it seems,
     for it has the power to hover there,
a horror to look upon,
    formless and blind and awful,
biding its time
     for a dawn of apotheosis.

 

The Future is a monster.
Who knows, but from its fire
and disaster, an archangel
will at last reveal itself?

 

 

 

 

We Did What We Had To

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

XV
They do the same thing over and over,
and then they say, “It had to be done.”
The abject throne, tottering, leans
for support against the anointed gallows;
to the proud and patient cranes, the eagle
seems an impetuous and useless creature.
Coligny, the Huguenot, is dragged by his feet
to die amid Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre;
Dante is deemed mad; Rome kicks out Cato; and Rohan hires thugs to beat up Voltaire,
while he watches safe in his carriage.

All these things have been certain truths
since the sun outshone the work of gilding,
since the days Socrates and Aeschylus,
Zeno and Epictetus and Zeno,
since those below shouted “No!”
to the” Yes!” of the free heavens,
since they laughed in Gomorrah, and in
its rude twin city, when Sparta fell
and Greece was cloaked in mourning,
since — oh, since two times a thousand
years ago, when two rival crowns appeared,
one on a scaffold, one on a pedestal,
two sides of a coin, two sides of our souls,
one in spun gold as a crown of laurels,
another in stone and shaped as thorns.
To one it seems a window to what
can never be attained, locked shut;
to the other, in arrogance, it seems
like the very mirror of self-won pride.

One shines on a throne at Capri and Rome,
the other glows darkly at Golgotha.

Kneading

by Brett Rutherford

Her hands never tire,
    although the pain is there,
a constant throb.

She kneads the dough.
It has to be done.
The hungry ones are used
to her white bread
with its crackly crust
like no other
     (lard folded in was one
          of her mother’s secrets,
     the rest a keen sense
of how long to keep on kneading).

Someone will bring
     the turkey, the pies.
Every last plate and cup
    will be found and used.

How many times today
she did her two-bucket
walk and back
    to the nearby spring,
how full the slop-pail would get
as she peeled the potatoes,
how long she’d hold it
before she had to trudge
to the outhouse and back:
who would number such things,
as frequent as the ticks
    and tocks
from the grandfather clock?

She hears it chime three.
They’d be coming soon,
and here she stands
all covered with flour,
hands greased with lard,
and still in her house-coat.

She goes to the closet.
Three things hang there.
The new dress,
    the old dress
for when it didn’t matter,
and the coat.

The old dress will have to do.

After all, nobody was dying.

 

 

 

The Thinker

by Brett Rutherford

After Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "June 1871"

IV

Statue, or man? The one who thinks —
immobile as a piece of marble
except for the occasional flash
from his fierce eyes —

does the forest whisper calm him?
Is he taking in the flowers
that spread around him?
Or is his gaze far-off
     somewhere in the heavens?

Is he lost in day-dream
    or deep in philosophy?
He is brow-to-brow with Nature,
which does everything it can
     to appease all humans.
The hills around are covered
    with vines ripening;
the orchard burst with apples.
The busy flies go on
    about their business,
buzzing this way and that.
The birds are a blur, so fast
     the only traces they leave
are glints on the pond’s waters.

The mill absorbs the flow
of the stream, and widens it,
begs the cool waters to stay a while
in the wide shallows.

 

In the water he can see,
     if he will only study it,
two images of everything,
     one up-and-down,
     one down-and-up,
but only a mirror obscure,
as words are
    to the thoughts above them.

 

In this profundity, nothing
    is useless; each atom
has its own task assigned.

The agitation of air and water,
the grain in the furrow striving,
each singular beast with its own
     ego and life and death,
all serving one end, all mass
subject to one magnetic pull.

 

In one immense wave
the infinite grass can surge
as one being, a hive of green.
Everything is in motion;
nothing is still, not even the rocks
in their slow grind of plates,
or the shrug of the volcano.
This planet is a metropolis
     of nests and dens,
flocks so vast no dogs could ever
     herd them to safety.

Stars move and collide,
     unknown to us night’s repose,
but at so slow a pace that next
to the clawing and striving below,
the business of galaxies seems
     an affair of indolence and sloth

That dark vermilion sky
     which rocks our waters to sleep,
and cradles our fruitfulness,
that which we name Life or Creation,
under its own turmoil,
     its Titan versus Olympian
          cosmos-shattering wars,
charms us and pretends to sleep.

Seeming never to come to wrath
the old gods bless our handiwork
with lazy indifference —
     oh, should they wake!

 

Is the thinker aware of this?
     Is he troubled? Who knows?

Does this omnipresent peace
    not dazzle his contemplating eyes?

From all around, from the valley,
    from the meadow to the height,
from the shaded, mysterious forest,
and from the glowing sky,
comes one welcome and soothing
    shadow, Peace,
and with it, a single ray of Joy.

 

Does he see where, across the ravine,
a little girl with eyes divine,
and nimble feet a Greek sculptor
would not scorn to imitate
in trembling clay, runs free,
chasing her goat before her
with a handful of branches —

this timeless moment stirs
and awakens the soul of the banished man.

 

He rises and says, “Alas! Alas! All I might say,
has not been said in full. The work
is not finished and never can be, while
they are digging pits beneath the pavement,
while some officer indicates a wall
where people are pushed
     to be exterminated,
while soldiers say “Yes!”
     to the order to fire,
because fathers and mothers,
     madmen and common thieves,
and those whose only misfortune
     is to be sickly,
          are executed at random,
killing without thought or choice,

and while the dead, still-bleeding bodies,
some only children,
are covered with quick-lime
     to eat the flesh away,
a hasty erasure of identity.

 

He shakes off the dust,
and rubs his eyes free of reverie.

No, he must go on!

To Cross the Sea

by Brett Rutherford

I should move to England,
if only to perish there,
in or not far from
some ancestral spot.
I have claim
to William the Conqueror's
land-grant, a ruined
castle or two, a manor
baronial, farmsteads
abandoned to birds
and nettles, a burial ground
with Roman and Druid bones
somewhere beneath.

I should, really,
for the British believe,
in their heart of hearts,
in ghosts. That means
I may persist
in pestering others
with whispered poems
for ages to come,

where here,
on the lunatic side
of the Atlantic, a poet,
dead, winds up
in a dead-tire heap
or land-fill, fame being
the time it takes
for a pot to boil dry.

Down at the Docks

In Greek legend, Galatea is a sea-nymph who loves a mortal boy named Acis. The monster Cyclops named Polyphemus loves Galatea and kills the boy. Galatea runs away and rejoins the sea nymphs.

Here is my modern retelling of the story:

DOWN AT THE DOCKS

by Brett Rutherford

One-eyed Paulie had this Gal, you see.
Gal was all they called her.
Oh, he had his eye on her.
She had both eyes on Acey,
who, having a preference
for the sailors,
wouldn’t even glance her way.

It was sad to watch it happen.
Paulie made his eye-patch wet
with weeping — Gal moped away,
pale as dried cod — Acey
missed out on all the flirting
that other guys would swoon for,
’cause he was buyin’ drinks
for all the Merchant Marine.

It reached a head one night
when Paulie caught Acey
behind The Gold Talon,
and skewered him good
with an old harpoon.
All things considered,
cops looked the other way,
Acey being, you know,
what was he doing there,
anyway, up to no good?

Then Paulie found Gal
just walkin’ the pier,
and as he tells it, “Look,
I just grabbed her.
I couldn’t help myself.”

She slid away from him
as smooth as an eel.
Fell in, she did, and sank.
They dived, they looked.
No sign of her.

Down at the docks, you need
to stay clear of one-eyed Paulie.
All he can think about is Gal,
and all he says is that
she’s off with the mermaids,
not dead at all, not dead,
not that. He moans,
“All I did was to grab her.
I couldn’t help myself.”

Wanderer's Song

by Brett Rutherford

I am my own shepherd. I do not want.
The neighbor whose pasture I slept in last night
does not mind: the fence is not for people.
Nuts fall from the trees, and apples, too.
Between two warring towns I freely walk.
In my simple ways I cannot distinguish
a friend from a foe. Three towers ring out
in clashing chorales of discordant bells.
Crowds waving books bound in the skins of lambs,
shout curses at one another. They look at maps,
draw angry lines to define a border,
and melt down their ploughshares to make a gun,
that will lift a whole village and drop it
again, consuming all in smithereens of rage.

Among such lunatics, it is not wise
to linger. Now, back to the hills for me!
Yet Nature has its hazards if you look.
Still waters breed mosquitoes, and wolves watch
to see who tarries there too long, and, lame,
would never outrun them to the forest brake.

My modest hut beneath a hanging rock
is serenaded by a pebbled creek,
and the bats, my silent brethren, swoop down
to tell the secrets of the coming dawn.

There is a valley where no one goes,
except, they do say, the dead and the mad.
Free-thinkers go there. Sometimes, among them,
we think we are the only ones who truly live.
We shake our heads at the cannons’ thunder;
and over the ridge, the exultant bugle
preludes the mutual cries of sudden death.
Some take a life, some give a life, for what?

We hold only the weapon of reason,
yet they would rather die than take it up.
Tempting it is to stay here always.
With brotherhood and peace
     my cup runs over.

 

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 5

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "June 1871"

5.

Imagine there’s an ocean
     with infinite depths

into which all troubles, cast,

close the book of destiny —
done, gone, and disappeared.

Let the ever-renewing waves
sweep clean the shore.

The tide keeps folding over
whoever is thrown into it.
Sea-maws open for new victims,
two hungry flaps for doors.

 

Hurl in the criminals!
If the innocent go, too,
punished in the confusion,
so what? It’s over now!

Judges rebuke historians
with gavels raised:
“Now, let’s not dwell on the past.”

 

To men of ice who never thaw,
always on the sharp edge
     of justice, impartial
to the to point of punishing all,
it is a matter or triage:
to cure a wound, cut off the limb.

 

Convenient it is,
to sentence men en masse.

New-minted justice
     could be order’s foundation,
but no! like fish thrown back
unwanted come to the net again,
those spared one horror
     have another in store,
their tick-marked names
up on one list and down
     on another.
All are cast into the same abyss.

 

Irrelevant: the facts, the doubts,

     the losses we all suffered
      together as a people,
the moil of the reckless men
and the brothers and women
     who followed them;
the child who took up
     the paving stones
or mocked the soldiers
      in lewd gesturing’

the crime of merely being
in a place where crimes occurred.

 

Instead we are told to believe
that everything was saved,
ills, tears, and turbulence,
not cut by a scythe, but swept
aside as though a broom

God wielded would sweep them all,
     storm-drain to sewer,
          and river to sea.
Look! The city! Open for business!

 

Smugly, you ask me to approve of this.
     What can I say? You are wrong.
The screams still echo.
The fear is palpable. The blood,
     the charnel pits, the grapeshot,
the sea so sick of justice
     it would vomit back your dead!

 

Since I stand here blaming you,
     next it is all my fault,

because I have something inside,
     that ticks and beats, and which
     you seem to be lacking.

How many more times
can lightning strike
     the blind and poor?

 

I shudder. Not to mention
the future harvest of revenges
your every action sows.

“Working for the best,” your
outcome is the worst possible.
If this in a state is wisdom,
     how does it differ
         from dementia?

 

That which flows out,
     tides back anew
with the force of the moon
     behind it.
Suffering and Hatred are sisters.

In darkness, one assumes
     the raiment of the other.

 

Now, even if I, whose guilt
    might be called a naïve innocence,
might return to that austere absence,
to the harsh and dreary isolation
    from which these last twelve months
    seemed as white as dawn,
even if some shadow, inexorable,
     called me back to my high cliff —
wretches without hope, you have
     one friend in me,
          and I will not be quiet!

 

People, you have the night
    and me, as your witnesses.
The law is dead. Hope has fallen.
Let it not see said that France
     fell into a total eclipse,
and no one said a word of protest.

I am calamity’s best friend.

 

To those who have been damned, I saw:
In Hell I walk beside you. I want to be —
to take this part, the best, to stand
beside the one who has never done evil
and whose cry will not be heard.

Your leaders led you astray; and I,
     at least, have told you history.

 

What poet would not prefer
     a golden victory?
Now I must take the part of the fallen.
My solitary march is not
     toward the flag of victory,
but somewhere off
     where the shrouds are gathered.

 

I open the grave of the common man.
And now your jeering rains upon me,
the shrieking of prostituted souls,
sarcasms paid for by the line,
gratuitous lies, the likes
of which Nonette and Maupertuis
tormented Voltaire,
     the same raised fists
which chased Rousseau away,
cries blacker than the winds
    of some Libyan sirocco,
more vile than that whip
     with leather straps
they used to scourge, in flight,
     the coffin of Molière,
the idiotic irony
     of your fierce anathemas,
the ring of dried saliva
     around the mouths
which had only yesterday spat
on the pale Christ’s forehead,
you flying stones
    eternally thrown at all
         who have been proscribed,
keep at it, fiends!

 

Outrages as yet unheard of,
     I welcome you.

I wear your insults as a badge.
The higher the affront
     against the people,
     the higher the glory.