A soothsayer is supposed to look ahead, but Dave Bonta's poem begins by cancelling that job: "foretelling the present." The old word is worth a glance. "Sooth" once meant truth, so a soothsayer is literally a truth-sayer, and that is the role the speaker keeps. What is true now is "misery," and nothing needs predicting because the trouble is already here. The central idea is that in dark times the honest work is to stay aware and to keep tending some inner place, not to deliver grand prophecies.
The second line carries most of the poem's weight. "I stay sensible of misery" uses "sensible" in its older sense of being conscious of something, though the modern meaning (practical, level-headed) hovers behind it and lends the speaker a dry steadiness. The verb matters too. The speaker doesn't "see" or "foresee" misery; he *stays* sensible of it, as one stays at a post. This is endurance, not inspiration. Then comes "the straits we are in." A strait is a narrow channel, so the phrase quietly borrows a sailor's vocabulary while also echoing the familiar idea of "dire straits." The line also ends on the tiny word "in," which leaves the reader inside the sentence with nowhere to go, much like the people it describes. Even the sounds suggest tightness: "stay," "sensible," "misery" and "straits" are threaded with hissing s's, like a low, careful voice.
The second stanza turns from the abstract to a picture, and the picture is a surprise. The speaker is "like the keeper of a church in the heart." A prophet would stand in a pulpit or on a hill, but a keeper unlocks the door, sweeps, and looks after the place. The word echoes "stay" from the stanza before, since both are about holding a position and watching over something. The church itself has moved indoors. It is not a building on a street but something in the heart, so whatever is sacred here has to be maintained privately. Whether "the heart" belongs to the speaker alone or to a whole community is left open, and the poem is richer for it.
Then, "where we garden all alone." Gardening is a small, patient, hopeful activity, and it is odd to find it in a poem about misery. Churches often come with grounds, and the garden may carry a suggestion of tending the dead, though that is an inference and the poem never says so. What is clear is the pronoun. The poem has been "I," and now it becomes "we," only to land on "alone." The people here share their situation but not their company, each at work in a separate plot. That tension between plural and solitary is where the poem's sadness sits, though the verb "garden" keeps the sadness from turning into despair.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters except the pronoun "I," so the speaker's own presence is the one thing marked out. Lines are uneven: the first stanza runs short, long, short, and the second opens with a long, trailing line before dropping to a shorter one. Without full stops, "the straits we are in" can attach to what comes before or float free, and the long line about the church flows on like a thought still being formed. The ending is quiet and musical, though. "Heart" and "garden" share a vowel sound, and "all alone" closes on slow, open sounds that let the poem fade out instead of snapping shut.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It takes a grand, ancient figure, the seer who knows what is coming, and gives that figure a humble caretaker's duty. The poem makes no promise of rescue and no claim to special knowledge. It says that the truest thing a person can tell about the present is that it hurts, and that the most useful response may be to go on tending a small, private, living place. Readers can decide for themselves whether "all alone" is a complaint or simply the condition under which such tending gets done.