Beautiful City
by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Beautiful city, the centre and crater of European confusion,
O you with your passionate shriek for the rights of an equal humanity,
How often your Revolution has proven but Evolution
Roll’d again back on itself in the tides of a civic insanity!

And now, my version:

Beautiful Ciudad
by Karen Cole-Peralta

Wondrous City of Lights, Parisian originalle,
Bent to the War, Moslem Jew & Christian banal.
Torture and hedonism lend to your spired Tour d'Eiffel,
The results of all tolling church bells medieval.
Which cannot erase any the things ha' been done;
In the name of God as side, side as God;
Nothing new is under the blood-swollen sun.

This seemed timely due to the recent riots in Paris. It seems as if the French Moslems decided to change their attitudes and resorted to uppity behaviors. Strangely enough, it was written quite a little while ago, altogether. The reason I used the Spanish word for city, "ciudad," instead of the French word for city, is due to the act of terrorism awhile back where an entire train was blown up along the tracks to Valencia, Spain. I believe that we are now in the wasted throes of World War III. Even though the current Middle East conflict began in the 1940s, the actual ME battle has been raging between the three major Western religious groups for centuries – no, millennia. It will be a long time before we see an end to what is going on, if we ever.