Even after my death my arms will rise
above and about this city
chipped and aged yet carrying the weight of years--
years of joy and fear and sadness
years of ideas and dialect
rhetoric and argument
comedy and tragedy
Until then they live beneath the ground.

The remains of robes,
the leather of sandals
fallen to dust or
eaten by mice
unraveling for centuries
like a thousand stories
told on this built ground and
remembered by millions.

How solid I remain
My belly swells still with remembered life:
that stage!
where great deeds happened again and again
through story, song, chant, declamation and
The waving of hands
The bellowing of words rushing
over the orchestra and through the stone seats
to the ears of the audience
their whispers are still there

I am the belly and the arms--
all that remains of what was
but what an all!
all that is needed to show
the world
that even after my death
the great plays’ words echo--
those of Seneca, a true Cordoban
and a true Roman,
and of Plautus, that writer of comedies--
from the mouths of the players
whose strides still reverberate on the tiles
the actors’ painted masks laugh or howl or weep--still--
even in the dimmest light
the music, the dance, thrums through the earth
no matter how sunken the theater
no matter how many miles of earth and stone
have been shoveled upon it.
Even after my death,
my arms rise above the destruction of all else
and my belly follows
and all who see are awed.

— Ellen A. Wilkin