From Salpetriere to L'Odeon

From Salpetriere to L’Odeon

At night streets revert to eighty winding lanes.

The people retreat behind locked doors

traffic disappears

pedestrians grow scarce

and darkness becomes a stage

for the mosque’s bowed reflection in the Seine

for the street cleaner splashing cobbles

for the bright bourgeois party behind thin curtains

for the Roman wall shouldering up against St. Genevieve

for the shuttered shops of Rue Mouffetard

for the exile home of Thomas Paine

for the pocked memories of the resistance on Sorbonne walls.

And there!

Behind those garden gates

and past the stone facades –

TheTour Eiffel explodes in a bright finale!

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