Creak

Sitting quiet in an empty room
one notices the little sounds that fill
the silence you once thought was always there
under the river of voices.

In the stillness something moves,
rattling the walls, creaking the doors
of ratway halls and subterranean floors.
It is the room itself that quivers so.

The grainy ground underneath it all
might be shifting with watery weight.
Rains washing in sheets across the rocky plates
bend, break the steel these walls were planted on.

So the sounds are signs of the falling, falling earth.
Let men then wonder what their walls are worth.

But these walls of plaster and of stone
can think and see and feel, all being made
in the image of man who does the same.
At least, I like to think of them that way.

And I imagine, seated quietly
that the walls and rocks even as they grow old
are crying out because we are silent.
We have become stone, and creation animated in its dying

crying “Blessed is the King who comes
in the name of the Lord!
Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”