Wexler gives chandeliers a wish: to leave the ceiling and join the dancers below. Night after night they watch the couples sway through the waltz, and they see their own glittering reflection in the polished floor. They long to be unhooked and float among the dancers, crystals jingling in time to the music.
Then, the morning after a gala, an earthquake begins. The chandeliers don't register it as danger. To them, the shaking feels like dancing at last. They swing from their thin electrical wires, lights flickering, barely worried, until they fall and shatter.
The mood is wistful and playful, with a darker edge. The speaker treats the chandeliers tenderly, and the poem's last words, "worth / every minute, every shard," say that a brief, wild moment of freedom can be worth the ruin it costs. The poem seems to ask what we would risk, or lose, to feel truly alive, even once.