(Harmony Square)
La Place de la Concorde
near the Hôtel Crillon.
In the Temps Perdu:
Madame Lafarge
and the tricoteuses
(who never forget)
sit and knit
to welcome Marie Antoinette.
'With my machine, '
Dr Guillotin tells the Assemblée Constituante,
'I cut off your head
in the twinkling of an eye,
and you never feel it! '
In the Here and Now:
a yellow granite obelisk
from the Luxor Temple,
3500 years old,
a present from the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt,
rises 75 feet above the centre of the square.
It, too, lost its cap in the sixth century BC
and has been given a gold-leafed replacement.
Unlike Marie Antoinette.
In 2000, the French 'Spiderman',
no hard hat or safety net
- just climbing shoes and hands quite bare,
scaled the obelisk right to the top
to the astonishment of Harmony Square.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
A lovely poem. I love Paris very much despite being a very expensive city. A lovely poem