Miracle

Everything cradled

there in the body’s night

can sense its own magnificence

if you remember how to gaze, creamy

and smooth, into the soul’s window.

Don’t be afraid to rove deeply 
into your own mysteries in

wonderment.

Know that you are a miracle

worthy of profound love

in how you give, walk,

listen, touch,

dream.

J. Pratt-Walter

© 2018

Forest Faerie Lesson

She thought it was

the stony hand of gravity pressing her

all the day long into the grit

of twilight, and her breath

was heavily afraid.

Then the forest faeries whispered

into her mind,

her mind shaped its music,

her music lit her heart,

her heart, for a moment, held all the sky,

every animal person, every plant.

She saw gravity’s authority only works

when you believe in it,

as does flight,

so she gained sky, the ugly-duckling-days made fresh,

her own brilliance filling her hourglass

with green magic that was

always there.

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2018

If Dreams Were Arms

,

Remember how the shape of the air

fit around you?

And the trees, so surprised at

your sterling beauty.

And if dreams were arms

and lips formed air,

I would hold you, singing, forever.

Now you honor a different wind;

skin can’t feel it,

but the heart surely can, and there,

such music that ears can’t bear

to hear.

J. Pratt-Walter

© 2018

She Really Tried

Nature tried to write this poem,

she really tried!

but the men who assailed her hammered

her right down,

her virtues both lush and crisp

sacrificed to the bastards

humping and dumping her precious ways

with thuggish dicks rolled in

vulgar corporate coarseness,

and no words

found their way home to poetry.

She wanted to believe in humans,

she really tried!

but every time she was blasted and fracked,

and for a few months after,

she cried tight immensities of tears

that they refused to hear,

that they never cared about if they did.

She wanted so sharply to be loved,

just to be loved!

Her pink labial flowers and her veiled waters

were just a place to dump jizz,

the fragile fruits of her countless breasts

there to be grappled

by the apes of lust, greed and power,

thrusting the sonnets back down her

sacred wild wellspring,

violated as fuck,

mute as the unearthed seed.

J. Pratt-Walter

© 2/10/2018

The Old House

Houses wear their history like a shawl,

draped loosely, with a

pin of years to hold it together.

Those voices?  Your mother, your father?

All gone like a late snow,

and now your own words, dispersing like wood-smoke

clocking all your years.

Feel the night

walk softly as a fawn through doors

and peer at itself

through midnight-blind windows.

Hear it husking though the old wood furnace,

counting all your steps and your time

until the patient end.

J. Pratt-Walter © 2018

Heart, Wings and Song

The first poem of the year

Loneliness

is the keening tundra swan

lost on migration

with a broken

wing…  Just the creak

of snow over snow and sadness, no wind

singing through her feathers.

Will you be the Healer

by just being present, listening to the redness

of her heart a few more

minutes?

The secret is, heart and wings are mended

by love,

just enough love to give her back

to the flowering sky-path

of her own ways,

heart, wings and song.

J. Pratt-Walter, (c) 1/1/2018