ALTAR: The Last Poem of 2023

Can you see that my entire body

is an altar?  My eyes are lit candles,

my lungs breathe out hope’s incense. 

My heart is a shaman’s drum pulsing

out life’s daily rhythm, tempered

with a searing chalice of honesty

lettered in my blood.

 

It is New Year’s Eve, yet the graceful snake

of each minute, every butterfly second

circles on time’s perpetual altar cloth

as each pregnant moment births its own

new year and another chance to do

what is right and true in what will become

the Auld Lang Syne of your times.

 

So what gifts will you set on your cloth?

Will your hands and feet be an offering

and landmark of accountability and compassion?

In the tilting lever of our days, be an altar.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 12/31/2023

GIVING THANKS

The old dog is snoring like an oboe.  We have so much

comfort, so much gratitude.  But a large piece of wind

plays me the anguish of people like long-distance calls,

 

extinguished in a midnight vigil where no moon rises,

where daylight is an infinity away.  Maybe hope rests,

tingling, in a different neighborhood, one of unknown

 

zip code. It’s harsh, isn’t it, to keep war’s terrible face

in mind as we share a magnificent meal of plenty

and grace as all the suffering in the world clamors below

 

every forkful in our home.  The sleeping dog

moans.  If I were a person of shallow religion I might quote

unfounded platitudes here about “working in mysterious

 

ways” or “everything happens for a reason”

as videos are blurred so all of us screen-watchers

drift past the horrors like a susurration of so many starlings.

 

Can we grasp the entire picture? This is how we have to do it

in America, with mouths full of unblinking compassion.

With holes in our collective stockings of serving ourselves first.

With hearts the size of suffering nations holding onto every

beat toward peace.

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023

 

little gray kitten

i know how the lost hurt kitten of your heart feels.

you have carried her softness so carefully, but she broke out

of a secret flaw inside, a fault line that

fractured your tiny kitten-bones to needles –

how they bent and wept!

 

come to me, and my womanhood

will gather in and bless what you cannot

seek or speak.

 

come, i will be a sustaining flower

for the fainting bee of your lost hopes.

i won’t ask why; i’ll simply do what must be done,

gather you into the medicine of my arms,

stitch the jaws of your injury closed, kiss your cold paws,

stroke that gray kitten back into her wholeness

bones and all.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2022