Reveille was bugled through army camps
As a soft dawn wind was fluttering street lamps.

It was that hour when smooth suntanned limbs
Of adolescents twitched with unlawful dreams,
When, like a bloodshot eye beside the bed,
A nightlamp soaked oncoming day in red,
When, weighted beneath a humid body’s brawn,
The soul mimicked that duel of lamp and dawn.
Like a face dried by the wind of recent tears,
The air is rife with whatever disappears,
And woman wearies of love, man of his chores.

Here and there chimneys smoked. The local whores,
Mascara’ed, overpainted, slept a stone
And stupid sleep, while the impoverished crone,
Breasts limp and frigid, alternately blew
On embers and on fingers, both going blue.
It was the hour of grief, of chill, of want;
Women in childbirth felt their seizures mount;
Like a thick, blood-choked scream, a rooster crowed
Distantly from some dim, befogged abode
As a sea of fog engulfed the city blocks,
And in some seedy hospice, human wrecks
Breathed their death-rattling last, while debauchees
Tottered toward home, drained of their powers to please.

All pink and green in flounces. Aurora strolled
The vacant Seine embankments as the old,
Stupefied, blear-eyed Paris, glum and resigned,
Laid out his tools to begin the daily grind.

                                                      Baudelaire