Almost everyone's on leave,

gone away

to the countryside,

in threadbare trucks

to pay respects

in rooms and huts

to watch and pray for dying ones

shrunken under sheets,

to vigils through the night

in closed off streets

where grandmothers prepare

small and smaller funeral feasts

after truncated prayers

chanted by tired priests

over cardboard caskets

in the deathwatch heat.

Gone to taxi ranks and stations

to wait for information

From billboards, radios,

word of mouth and trumpets in the sky

where ubiquitous hadedas,

unlike Auden's mute impervious birds

blast their high shofars*

over each infected space.