I Have Never Been a Sailor

I have never been a Sailor

but I feel the sea roiling below me

on a broken-cloud morning.

We have so much to teach

each other, the tides and I—

 

an ocean knows how to never be still,

how to be furiously strong and wild

yet dance so delicately with the moon.

How to hold something up when

it is flotsam. How to claim what sinks.

 

Sea, can you hear me?  I am

singing all the harmonies to the

drum of your pulse.  I can show you

how to wear bones and how to move

through air wearing gravity out loud.

 

I can light fires while you can only extinguish.

See?  I am igniting my curiosity right here

on your sandy shoulder.  Watch me bend down

and silently kneel before your mysteries,

folding my legs like sorrow feels.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023

crucible

listen      the desecrated earth cries out

she heaves in catastrophic tongues

of storms

drought

floods

fires

disease

listen    these are the last moments to act

this is the alarm clock and crucible of endings

this is when the children must teach the adults

there is no option of both survival and failure to act

so pick one, people

choose wisely     not just for yourself

but for all the look-ahead lives to come

 

J. Pratt-Walter NaPoMo 4/1/2023