Earthquake

 They say an earthquake is coming,
A rattle that will undo the world.
We won't know until it's over
And everything we knew is gone forever. 
 
Until the day it happens,
We will think of it with awe.
"Just think of how cool it would be
To see the world turn upside down",
We'll say.
The walls falling down,
The light coming in,
The dust choking us while concrete slabs crush our bodies,
The moment it all ends.

But then we think, in the early morning,
About how hard it would be to prepare.
The bookshelves should be affixed,
The house should be braced,
But none of that matters if we're not home when it happens.
Then we remember what we'd lose,
The bits of ourselves that we stack up on shelves,
And that's when we realize
That we don't want the earthquake to come.

No matter what we want or think,
Someday we'll feel the earth shake beneath us
And watch the world crumble while our bodies break apart.
When it's over,
We'll talk on and on about how we failed,
And all that we could have done.

The earthquake won't be the sunset of an old world
Or the dawn of a new,
All it will be is a moment burned into our memories,
A moment when everything changed.
In the future, our children's children will talk
About where we were and what we did
When we felt the world rip apart,
But we won't remember it at all.

Will we move on from a city of rubble?
Will we build something better and brighter?
Can we learn to build something so strong and sturdy
That we'll be safe when the earth starts to shake?
Or will it only ever be a matter of time
Before we have to rebuild once more?