CLOAK

My gratitude

is a thick warm cloak

but first I must remember

out of the tangled night

to pull it on.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

Listen

 I can hear it in the silence

of my ancestors.  Between

their stories breathes a

terse quiet

 

too large for mere

words.  They call it

 

the Voice still

and small.  It rings

under my ribs,

 

an unstopped bell

in the center of my

wholeness.

 

It took 60 years to sense

its strange music

 

but I am going along,

and as I go, I listen.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

LANDINGS

How the trees murmur

like serious doves to their

waning leaves in their leaving…

 

You must let go, child.  Fly.

 

Silent as a Sylph the joining breaks,

the umbilical veins from tree to foliage

sever and you can never

 turn back.

Does it hurt to land?

Maybe.  But perhaps no more

than it pains us

to grow.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

PILGRIMAGE

 The wild geese hone their language

over the Columbia slough, spearing the voices

of wildness into my chest, sharp and alive.

If you can marvel with me how

their wild orations turn the season,

you are my kindred Autumn soul.

Come meet me here on the Plains of Untamed

 Mystery.  We need no name for each other

there but friend, but pilgrim, but God.

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

Infinity

The effervescent day

I met you was like my

fingers meeting my thumb

on the same hand

for the very first

 

time, and bending close

in a pantheon of sparks,

touching into a circle

of infinite marvels and

 

all possibilities unburied

by shaking out shadows

and finding them to be light.

 J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

The All-Miracle Church of Earth

 In our curve of time the framework of Love

is still being dreamt open –

Love seeps and strokes into the wounds of the spirit

like silk blessing the first leaf born of the first bud,

unrolled atop the first root, enshrined from the first Source.

 

Beloved ones precious as air lace our seconds and days together,

a vivid shawl sewn in the cadence of our kaleidoscope souls.

 

The slow streams preach their smooth water-truths,

the snow is its refrain: “Shhh love now, shhh love often”

they whisper to us like salamanders in the shape-shift moments.

 

Love weaves through the gills of our being

alive together on this All-Miracle Church of Earth,

of everything hallowed, brokenly true,

of all things Yes, igniting us while capturing fallen sparks

chimed from the ecstatic tongues of stars.

  

 J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

In the Hold of the Deep

 Life is like a window exposed gradually

            by the tide, and you, not seeing ahead, trusting

            the wisdom of flowing.

 

You may not know where currents

will lead in their curious compulsions.

You may not even know

if you are the ship or the sea,

 

a reader of heaven’s oracular map

or a sailor lost beneath the waves there

in the hold of the deep, who, when reaching

for the moon’s pale smile, finally learns to swim.

 

Jennifer Pratt-Walter, © 2020

My Hands

Look at my hands,

all the wide years penned into an atlas of wrinkles,

blue snakes of veining, scars where blood

spilled its iron for a cause.

 

Look at my palm, then

turn it over to see rough-knuckle memories 

going back and back to the time

of all the grandmothers and great grandmothers

for as long as there have been hands.

 

Through me the ancestors still feel the living soil,

they hum to a newborn with a poem of holding,

they cradle a beloved face at the last breath.

Their lives are printed upon all my cells,

they speak from inside with every gesture,

behind every grasp, scrape, caress.

 

Look at my hands, how they have been reborn

in my children, still holding the pencil

that writes the next story. 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

Opening Pandora's Box

Justice for Women

is Justice for Mother Earth,

and too great for mere words,

but our XX

Chromosome power

has been fallowing

for generations.

 

We are the lips to

Pandora’s riotous box.

We are stretching up

and primed

to spear her light

 

scribing it into our

collective mythology

for healing,

our dazzling souls

unleashed, flung

wide open with the lightning

of our XX convictions.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

The Road Home

I taste clay-flavored memories

on the road home, reaching out of the night.

The trickle of light waving inside me sighs--

it can never shine as marvelously

as late sun leaning through droplets

on the tops of these firs and alders,

or even as the moon, remote above her clouds.

It can never lead me back to before.

Somewhere in the chorus of rain,

among scents of mud and fresh cambium,

between the last cricket’s lull and the frog’s first prelude

a new Bible has been accidentally written

right here by a forest at night.

It tastes of fresh wood, spring rain and clay.

I enter it and become.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

Thrush in My Hand

Small brown thrush

with injured wings—

the cat brought her in,

such delicate things

 

and as she dies,

oh, how she sings.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, (c) 2021