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
