June, 1832

These dragging summers scorch our streets

With drought that bakes the cobblestones,

And blisters naked gamin feet

And sears our eyelids in the heat

Of barricaded danger zones.

We find the bullets in the bricks

Of houses that have lost their souls,

In gutted, broken-windowed wrecks

The inauspicious side-effects,

Now riddled full of cartridge holes.

Not long for Paris to forget

Just one more sultry afternoon,

While bodies rot in streaking sweat

And stagnant gutters reek with death;

The panic will be over soon.

The rubble in the Chanvrerie

Which used to be a barricade,

It crumbles to obscurity –

Another disappointed dream

Of men who stayed when no one came.

Their carcasses will not resent

The scavenging of hungry hands

That cannot realize what was meant,

Or recognize the compliment;

They knew we wouldn’t understand.

Elusive like the hazing heat,

The unacknowledged idol of

The comrades of the ABC –

They thought that it was liberty,

They should have called it love.

Our sunburned city wonders why,

And shrugs their tragedy away

But streets that swarm with feasting flies

Are sticky with their sacrifice;

Their blood has blessed this summer day.