The Sirens

When the sirens began to sound
Nobody paid much attention to them
The conversations were not interrupted
When the sirens began to sound
The operator did not disrupted the connection
That was in the middle
Quotations on the market continued to go up
And down in their empty stairs
And the gunman remained silent
In the dark, lurking
The mother stopped not breastfeeding the child
When the sirens started to ring
And the dogs raised their heads, slowly
Something biting their brains
Nobody realized that that sirens were not the customary sirens
Those that advertise fire conflagrations
And cars being stolen
Or the end of the affliction to the workers in the factory
The day was in his half
When they began their monotonous impersonal refrain
Their acute song (and that was the only one who they knew)
Simpler than that of the machine-guns sounding
Along a barbed wire fence
More primitive than the cry of a bored child
At first no one noticed. But... it wasn't their fault!
They hadn’t been advised that the sirens would sound
Only a chosen few had been trained
To wait for the sound that would come, suddenly
These were still the same, the same
Much later, when the sirens went silent

José Cassais