Mata Hari Mon Amour

Mata Hari, for the first time since she had been arrested, began to see the futility
of the efforts to save her.... People whom she knew innocently had become dangerous
companions; conversations which were private and intimate had become acts
committed to divulge secrets of state; things that were simple became complicated;
actions that were plain became guilty, and Mata Hari knew that explanations
were of no avail. The war had changed everything - small things had become big,
and appearance had become reality.
- Sam Wagenaar, Mata Hari

Tonight they're dancing at the Folies Berg?re,
cigar smoke rising thick as black curls.
Lovers clink glasses, betrayal in the air
sweet as the flesh of a new showgirl.

Out at Ypres, thick as black curls,
smoke ascends from fields of mud,
as a moonbeam bathes a dozen dead girls
rejected as barter for your head.

Disgraced, abandoned, your name now mud
in every salon and Bundeskammer,
somehow you managed to keep your head
afloat amid the tides of rumor.

Later salons and Bundeskammers
will dim their lights, but not for you.
Spy or lover, eventually rumor
replaced your life, made it twice as true.

Dear Margaretha, whoever you
thought you could be became a lie
told by Mata Hari, but not as true
as the woman at dawn ready to die.

For who? For God and country? Lies
thick as smoke at the Folies Berg?re?
No matter. It's done. The life that died
was betrayed by those shots shattering the air.