A Thread is so Slender

A Thread is so Slender
(for Terry)
by Sue Monk Kidd
A thread is so slender
Yet here I am with one strand of ferocious hope
Afraid it is the last thread
Hanging from the torn seam of the earth,
Afraid we have finally gone and pulled it,
The blue-green world, unraveling like a ball of yarn into the spheres.

Still I go on holding this thread.
I love the daring inside it
How it is always beginning.
It talks to the humblest thing in me:
Why don't you risk everything for hope?
What if one gives birth to two, and two gives birth to three?
Does the universe dwell in a pumpkin seed?

A thread is so slender
And dangerous.
It is a beam of light no bigger than a wire, yet
it holds so many suns,
The way a drop of fire contains the whole inferno.
What if it is a fiber of God just floating about?
What if it harbors inside it the very tapestry that will save us?

A thread is so slender.
It hides in plain sight in the corners of my kitchen,
subverting the domestic morning.
I catch it riding currents in the backyard
like a child gone to play.
But back again, curled on my pillow for the night
pregnant by some small piercing of hope.

We are always having this conversation.
I say: Stretch the world upon a loom,
Let kindness be our warp, gentleness our woof.
May we never tire of this back and forth,
back and forth,
The daily shuttle of loving each other.
There are visions shining in our fingers,
And we will not cease.
We will expand to this moment.

Here is what the thread tells me:
I believe in the loom.
http://www.threadproject.com/asp/default.asp