J'accuse in three voices

JOB

All day long the friends came into his tent,

Drank tea with his wife, and watched the man

Pitiful now, covered in boils, sitting on his dung heap.

When he spoke, they tried to comfort him,

Assured his anguish would disappear

If only he acknowledged his mistakes,

Apologized to his maker.

But he answered them and pointed out the flaws

In their arguments, the strained analogies,

The inferences wrongly drawn,

The liturgical poetry full of contradictions,

Birds falling out of the sky like thunderbolts,

Ostriches burying their eggs and forgetting where.

Then the welkin and the whirlwind spoke,

Like the young examiner who had joined them all,

And tried to silence the jabbering old fool,

Said he did not realize how ancient were the days,

The great expanse of universe on universe

Where leviathans and behemoths were grazing,

And justified his ways by power and precedence.

Job cowered on the pile of filth,

Peered out into the blinding light,

Proclaimed he was defeated, but not his logic,

Not his all essential innocence.

The storm clouds passed and eventually the winds.

And then beyond belief the voice returned.

It addressed the three old men and the arrogant youth

To tell them they were wrong all of them,

And he, the wretched ironist was right,

And they were to restore his losses and his prestige,

And that it all was a testing time, a little game

Inaugurated eons earlier on the porch of heaven

With they knew who.

The tragedy was never consummated therefore,

Although the loss of children was not reconciled

And vast doubts persisted ever since.

DREYFUS

A young soldier was accused, the evidence was false,

The army and the state were insulted

By his claims to innocence, his chutspa,

And off he went to Devil’s Island half-mad.

Then after some signatures were gathered and some protest

He was brought back to Paris five years later.

Forgery, fraud and flatulence,

The same fatuous accusations.

Another trial with the same old lies

And the same arrogance in Rennes.

Haggard, tottering, unable to speak,

They found him guilty yet again

To their own shame.

But they had to concede some little technicalities

And grant a pardon, a grudging grace,

But he would not shut up.  I am innocent.

But the army never really accepted the findings

Of the civil courts.  He sat alone and then he died.

In due course, too, when the Swastika slobbered over Paris,

They took their revenge on him and all his kind.

Karsenty

Now again, when a simple man speaks up for truth,

Calls journalism propaganda

They vilify his efforts, mock his case, and turn

The world inside out to undercut the facts.

A little boy was murdered, they said, a martyr,

Though no bullets marked the spot, no corpse was shown;

It was enough the demonic ones were there to prove the cause.

In a small instance, he won his point, and they,

As usual, rallied their supporters, inverted language,

And had him found guilty again,

This time without a compensating clap of thunder

Or a pretence of sympathy. 

It’s journalism, its integrity, its honor,

But the truth is otherwise and other where.

As always until we return to the second voice

In the whirlwind, the unflagging voice of J’accuse.