The setting is American but this poem by Billy Collins, who was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, probably describes fairly universal attitudes to ambulances when they pass. The piece comes from his eleventh collection, The Rain in Portugal (Picador, £9.99).

LESLEY DUNCAN

SIRENS

Not those women who lure sailors

onto a reef with their singing and their tresses, but the screams of an ambulance bearing the sick, the injured, and the dying across the rational grid of the city.

We get so used to the sound

it's just another sharp in the city's tune.

Yet it's one thing to stop on a sidewalk with other pedestrians to watch one flashing and speeding down an avenue

while a child on a corner covers her ears and a shopkeeper appears in a doorway, but another thing when one gets stuck in traffic and seems to be crying for its mother who has fled to another country.

Everyone keeps walking along then,

eyes cast down - for after all,

there's nothing we can do,

and today we are not the one peering

up at the face of an angel dressed in scrubs.

Some of us are late for appointments

a few blocks away, while others

have the day off and take their time

angling across a broad, leafy avenue

before being engulfed by the green of a park.