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Letter To Ronald Hull On His Comment On Diary Notes: Lament At Dawn
Letter To Ronald Hull On His Comment On Diary Notes: Lament At Dawn
LETTER to RON" Diary Notes : Lament at Dawn - A Year Ago Yet Now No Change "
Reviewed by Ronald Hull
8/19/2018
"Quite a lament! The state of Paris at dawn. Just the thought of sewage seeping down through the walls gives me the willies. Yes, Paris is not the same. But has it ever been? Always being overrun by the disenfranchised from the world over. Making their mark in art and artistry. Creating the trends."
At www.authorsden.com/visit/cat_poetry.asp
Bonjour Ron !
True, Paris was a trend-setter in the Arts
A magnet not only for the disenfranchised
Hemingway Fitzgerald Henry Miller Durrell Anaïs Nin
Burroughs Joyce Picasso
Baldwin Wright Sekoto
Later expatriate hordes imitated their life-styles
And fell far short of their weight in words
And you must agree Paris has since given way
To other renegade catalysing milieux
NY London Berlin Amsterdam LA
To name en passim just a few
What has changed in between
Is that the français de souche
Justly proud but
Drunk arrogant with their Napoleonic past
Let the last Mohican
De Gaulle
bear the brunt of decadent glory
Such that even the well-entrenched
Well internationally-knit
Jewish community
Victims of Petain Vichy
Collaboraters of the NAZI
Are beating a retreat
In the face of Maghrebian dual-nationality
Being substituted in power positions professions
and in the art of enticing the mademoiselle
though the Jewess preferred the eminent French
Asians not to be un-done
Have poured through in chain-gang droves
To colonise arrondissements
Not to mention 93rd and 94th départements
Cambodians Formosans Vietnamese Laotians Chinese
Indians Pakistanis Bangladeshis Sri-Lankanese
Iranians Turks Egyptians Syrians Iraqis
Yugoslavians Poles Spaniards Russians Italians Portuguese
All crowd out the local menial work market
And the lucrative spicy import-export racket
Though only one Nobel Gao Xin-jian
Left to wonder in expatriate limbo alone
The French love their leisure and pleasure
Love to dine out disappear on an August trot-about
Lose themselves in the heights of February ski vacations
Slumber through Christmas confessions
Find less and less workdays in May
There's nothing wrong in that
Who would not say
But can they count more than two establishments
In the first hundred top university list of accomplishments
But migrants hard on their heels
Quick to take offence at Sarkozy's
Sarcastic " Riff-Raff " compliments
Rail rage burn and sack the capital
To fray a disrupting brêche
Into the higher echelons around Elysée Palace
Everyone knows the custom here is
Hoodwink the Law if you can with ease
And no one's more adept at this game
Than the migrant still to make a name
© T. Wignesan - Paris, August 19, 2018
Copyright © T Wignesan | Year Posted 2018
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