So There It Is

So there it is: the siren. It’s 10 am. The three of us
stand up around the table in the small dinette–
for some reason we all face the window
and the birds are chirping their heads off.
In my mind are my father’s losses: sister, big brother,
his wife, his two sons–and the story my mother told me
just last year very carefully, shaking off for a moment
the slowly rising flood of confusion and timelessness
that more and more is her life these days:
that when they visited Yad Vashem in ’77,
one month before his final stroke, my father had fainted,
having discerned his brother among the open sea of faces
there. And in my mind it’s yitgadal v’yitkadash
for Motek and Rina and the wife and sons
whose names I don’t know (and for my father, too) and
the next thing I know it’s my first
Yom Ha-Shoah in Israel nine years back
on a highway in the middle of the Negev at 10 am,
the few cars to be seen in the wide and flat terrain
pulled over to the side under a big sky, and by each of them
one or two figures standing silent and now,
now, breaking into and penetrating the drone of the siren
is a silly musical phrase calliope-like
they use instead of a bell to mark the end of each class
in the school across the way and one minute
has elapsed and before I know it
the siren is rising in pitch and the two minutes are gone
and there is silence for a beat,

and for that second minute, I realize,
there were neither birds nor inner words nor memory
nor breath, for one entire minute, all there was
was the sound of the siren and that was all there was.

—Bernard Horn