Barbara Lydecker Crane

Sirens
        
Piercing pain toppled me like a tree. I woke to an off-key siren,
knowing the ambulance was coming for decrepit me — no siren —

half-dressed on the floor. Firemen loomed, lifted and lugged
me down to the ambulance, a rattling van with a banshee siren.

It was hardly a plush ride. I had always imagined snug comfort  
where I’d be queen-for-a-day, a pampered celebrity. The siren

would clear the way for me, just as each police car, fire engine,
and ambulance screams out its mission with a marquee siren.   

Are most ambulance missions ferrying old souls to hospitals?
Some don’t even survive the trip. It’s no guarantee, the siren.

I hobbled while my broken foot healed. But I won’t forget 
the shocking pain, keeling over in a syncope, and the siren.

Now walking on Broadway, with a tell-tale wail behind me,
I’m relieved that for now, it’s not coming for me, that siren.

Prize-winning poet Barbara Lydecker Crane’s fourth collection, You Will Remember Me, sonnets about portrait paintings in the imagined voices of artists through the centuries, was published by Able Muse Press in 2023.