Anne Frank

The canal dapples the office ceiling.

Upstairs, the fugitives are still as dust.

A siren unpeoples the city.

Into the waiting sky, with the raucous gulls

and the chestnut, her words like breathing…Her life

has turned, beyond all her desires, so

brutally to art…They packed and waited:

beyond, a locked compartment to themselves

and telephone wires curvetting by -

then countrysides of shuddering, noisome wagons.

She died alone. Her father made her grief,

her love public as Europe: spoke her words

into the empty sky.