—for Susan Sontag

Like a gardener turning to details
of sun and soil, she describes
the continuum of rhythm
even chaos must confide in.

Staging this play where loss
makes the present look old
cedes a common routine
back to second nature.

While the audience tends
a fragile truce of candlelight
and watches the master tramps,
one Muslim, one Serb, face their fears,

life takes after the days
when walking home,
setting a table, and eating a meal
was the natural order

adding up to earth.
How gracefully she downplays
her own close calls
like a chorus keeping the faith

of that makeshift theater
and those inside who find hope
in its hopeless words
completely worth the risk.