(no subject)

The tenth arrondisement, November 13, 2015

They call it the grey area, but it is not grey, it is full of color.
It is full of color and shape and texture and movement,
full of sound, harmoniously discordant, full of everything that grows and lives.
Its bouquet is yeasty, sweet, piquant, rank, fresh, and sharp: it is everything but decadent.


When strangers come to this land and make their home here, become not strangers,
serve their neighbors the fragrant foods of their faraway birth lands,
play the music forged of the rhythms and notes of all these worlds,
they light the night sky with friendship and joy:

they create a world where the chorus of human voices join in a triumphant crescendo,
a world where these pavements bloom with blossoms never seen before:

a world that is a world.

You want that gone: you want friends to be enemies, you want blood on the pavement
blood across the tabletops of innocent restaurants
shards of destruction at the friendly game.

You want new friends to be strangers. You want rage against the innocent.
You want to shatter the new world, reduce it to the ashes of the old.

I think you may succeed, for now. But a world of color and song is better than a world of black and white
and I think it will bloom again.