Paris Street, Rainy Day
This is a pastiche of W. H. Auden’s (1907–1973) masterpiece, Musée des Beaux Arts (1938). Auden’s original poem has 21 lines, so I based my poem almost completely on the rhyming scheme of the first original 14 lines of Auden’s poem, thus making my poem a sonnet.

Paris Street, Rainy Day is a fabulous, enormous painting by Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894), which is held in the Art Institute of Chicago, and I visited it almost once a week for a few years. It was painted in 1877, the year that Northern forces withdrew from the American South, thereby ending Reconstruction, and allowing civil rights abuses towards black Americans to continue until the civil rights era in the 1960s.
['Matthew De Lacey Davidson']
['Compassion', 'Paris', 'Impressionism', 'France', 'Mindfulness']