Did you ever think there might be a fault line

passing underneath your living room:

a place in which your life is lived in meeting

and in separating, wondering

and telling, unaware that just beneath

you is the unseen seam of great plates

that strain through time?  And that your life, already

spilling over the brim, could be invaded,

sent off in a new direction, turned

aside by forces you were warned about

but not prepared for?  Shelves could be spilled out,

the level floor set at an angle in

some seconds' shaking.  You would have to take

your losses, do whatever must be done

next.

          When the great plates slip

and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen

to lie in what you trusted most, look not

to more solidity, to weighty slabs

of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered

beam to save the fractured order.  Trust

more the tensile strands of love that bend

and stretch to hold you in the web of life

that's often torn but always healing.  There's

your strength.  The shifting plates, the restive earth,

your room, your precious life, they all proceed

from love, the ground on which we walk together.

Robert R. Walsh

© 1992 by Robert R. Walsh.  All rights reserved.

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