Inhale those odours within
la Ville Lumière – of corpse wax
found among her exhumed
Draw on le cimetière des Innocents
An old miasma off rotting flesh
lingers in time’s stillness
above French Empires of Death
atop her levelling grounds
Citizens sought
salubrious solutions
as well as judicial balance
by opening wide old books
by breaking cracking spines
glued by their learned dead writers
Thinkers took routes dug through
others – now equal – as bones
Inert citizens will never stop
troubling the living of Paris