Paris When I was in Paris, alone, before the war, To make ends meet, I played piano at the old Hotel d'Empire. The gaunt maitre d' helped her coat off at the door, And what had driven me from home at once came clear. She asked for "Night and Day". "For the same, in turn," I said. She had eyes like summer thunder, And lilac petals in her bed. Her family was Prussian--estates, a coat of arms-- And they had hoped a trip abroad might mend her father's failing health. For his part, he seemed...unimpressed with my rude charms. But love, like anything, seems richer plied in stealth. We'd meet in low cafes. We would meet along the Seine. But when Poland fell she told me That we could not meet again. And I have always held abstention from the roundelay of violence as the only moral course For only force, and never principle, is learned from all our principled deployments of force. And if it's true that all this mayhem's just the aftermath of what we'd called "the war to end all wars," That's further proof that we should learn how to forget, and not to try to settle, all our old scores. And though adoption of this stance may have cost me All my best tips and half my friends, I'd fall asleep at night sure I'd be proved right in the end. And you know the rest--how, at last, on Norman sands, Across a body trail, the Allies ran the German guns to ground. She stood at my door, bloodspray on her face and hands, And said that it would mean her life if she were found. But love is blind as justice, And the blind may lead the doomed. So I found her passage homeward: Among her dead, she lay entombed. You say she bore secrets. Well, this I could not know. But if you're right, and if I had, I fear I would have done the same. You see, I still loved her, and whatever winds now blow, My only crime was love, and love my only shame. Carve these words below my name.