Christopher Street

Today an earthquake will hit Christopher Street.
Its neat suburban semis will all lose their foundations:
they will rock and reel and tumble, while their
neat garden beds, trimmed hedges and lawns lift and shake,
and the neighbourhood sparrows fly up in alarm.

It is ten in the morning, and the sky is dark,
the daybreak sun having gone into hiding.
And on the doormat of number thirty-five lies a letter
delivered a little later than usual
by the friendly postman,
today’s well-meaning bearer of seismic change:
a letter whose scent of honeysuckle and rose,
hint of an unsafe shade of lipstick where the note was sealed,
both attracts and appals.

Daring to open the envelope in her husband’s absence,
she reads the list of demands
thinly veiled behind words of pledge and adoration;
and the tremors lift off the Richter Scale,
the walls around her fall.
It was always sunny in Christopher Street,
and the ground beneath her had always seemed
so safe and stable.
Now it never can be again.