In Honor of the Liberation of Auschwitz

It is Raining on the House of Anne Frank

It is raining on the house of Anne Frank

and on the tourists herded together

under the shadow of their umbrellas,

on the perfectly silent tourists who would rather be somewhere else

but who wait here on stairs so steep they must rise to some occasion

high in the empty loft,

in the quaint toilet,

in the skeleton of a kitchen or on the map-

each of its arrows

a barb of wire-with all the dates,

the expulsions,the forbidding shapes of continents.

And across Amsterdam it is raining

on the Van Gogh Museum where we will hurry next to see how someone else could find the pure center of light

within the dark circle of his demons.~ Linda Pastan