Elle aime Paris.

Was she grown up on fairy tales, of little princes and cats that were aristocratic?
Was it the prose of Alexandre Dumas that made her love Aramis?
Did something go really right, or did something go quite amiss?
Why did her love for France grow and grow and grow, refusing to stay static?

The city of love and lights and fashion,
Of food and art, culture and romanticism,
Where all is seen through beauty's prism
She longed for it all with passion.

And as she still grew up that love remained unbound,
To her, her country seemed a flaw, a mockery of nature,
To escape, she lost herself, and graduated, in French literature,
And for her pain and her success, she found herself Paris-bound.

And her nose did not smell the piss and crass of the metro,
Her eyes denied the poverty and the vice and violence,
Her mind blocked off all the racism and the decadence,
And anything old or malfunctioning she internalized as retro.

She wandered and wondered in the Louvre, Versailles and la Sorbonne,
She revelled in art in Quais d'Orsay, went to the Moulin Rouge to see Can-Can,
Admired the paintings of Manet and Monet, Picasso, Dali and Petitjean,
And let herself be flirted in the bistros near Charonne.

And the months went by and and finally, her love blossoming like a flower,
The city having convinced her this was no passing fling,
She grew, like her love, big and all-encompassing,
Having decreed to love Paris corporeally, inside her she put the Eiffel Tower.