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

 

At the Closing

I pick up the worn shovel, handle frosty

and slick.  I feed it to the ground by the mimosa tree

and press hard with my weight on one foot.

The soil yields beautifully.

 

I know very soon, this sacred ground

will receive her of the dark gold hair, the bleached

muzzle, the eyes once alive as obsidian light,

that dog-breath smile.

 

The old girl is shaking this morning

and cannot rise.  I help lift her back end.

Her feet splay out on the floor.  Her eyes are worried,

even afraid.  I caress her bent head

leaning into my leg.  “I know, girl, I know.

Soon.  Will it be today?”  I don’t want to

answer that question yet,

 

but here I am, excavating the ground

between the vegetable garden and my favorite tree,

envisioning motherly soil holding her wasting

frame close, the swirls of her hair trimmed by fallen

 pine needles, her bones and blood that loved us so much

that she will forgive me and forgive me

for bringing that love to a peaceful

close. 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2022 

All the Unmapped Stars

Oh, we see the stars, all right,

their brittle cold mystery

 

but if you took the gentlest

of knives and pushed open

the top of my head like clay,

 

in there are all the warm constellations

one could dream of, a star nesting

in every fingertip, Polaris in each eye,

a Milky Way down my core.

 

Here are all my unmapped stars, the candles

of my small hopes, oh, and look,

there are a few of yours there too!

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2022

Dove Wings

 

                                                                           Are we in a dream that thinks we are

a forest, or are we a forest that thinks it is

a dream?  Here below the greenery

the silent dove of my being reaches one feather out

to you.  Are we people dreaming we are doves,

or are we doves dreaming we are humans?

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2022

Your Beauty

I adore how you wear beauty

in crinkles around your eyes

so that the beauty you see becomes

part of your face.

 

That’s how I want to love –

with my heart as receptive

as your eyes.

 

J. Pratt-Walter 

© 2022

You are in My Circle

To Karl A.

 

You wore your grief unseen like

your skeleton: always there but never

directly in view unless you know the landmarks

to watch for after your true love dies.

 

What was it like, your passing?  Did it quietly ring with

Amazing Grace going on ahead?  Did you lean out

of your body, moving like clouds announcing a storm?

Was it like a math equation, never anything

but fixed and perfect?

 

Wherever and whatever you are, (or perhaps

you are undefinable) I am drawing a circle

of gratitude wide enough to encompass your compassion,

all your great glad works lighting our hearts, and more,

I am drawing the hoops and loops that humble and hold us in unity,

to invite one to kindness, to sow peace in an unpeaceful world,

and to affirm that you are magnificently loved

like numbers love their own square root.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, ⓒ 2022

Playing the Game

“Chess--I know how to play,

but not how to win.”

     -Overheard at a restaurant

 

The rules of this chess flew like circling hawks,

landing here and there when invoked

or hovering above, ready to assert themselves

as needed until the game was won.

 

But the game was for other people,

the pretty ones, the popular, me being

the wallflower shuffling like an abandoned cat

at the margin of the high school dance

throbbing in the gym after a football game,

the slippery eel of self-doubt hooked in my throat.

The playbook for this chess was not in my library.

 

I suffered outside the flirt game, and even more

for actual romance: prom, his arms encircling my waist,

mine curled around his neck in that longed-for

slow dance, low lights and music pushing, pushing lips

into kisses, the extravagant touching claimed by others

who knew how to win that game.

 

These days I play solo chess with no rules

but my own.  I’m still that strange wallflower

but I know how to walk alone, I give myself permission

to dance.  I plow and seed my own land,

 I mule along outside of that old game. 

The regrets clank on in a black alley inside me

with neither welcome nor map. But maybe that’s me

discovering another way to win.

 

J. Pratt-Walter (c) 2022

                                                                  The Wallflower

  

Sonnet 50

Do flowers know the mystery of roots

or snow the droplet-dancing of the thaw?

Do morning birds hear poetry in their flutes,

do trees cry out when bitten by the saw?

 

Do caterpillars sense cocoons ahead

to shed their land-locked lives as left for dead?

Do honeybees rejoice to find their hive

when pollen-laden, wings spread wide to life?

 

 No questions from the tally of our days

or where or how they close inside the gloam --

I recall you everywhere sun plays,

and all the places laughing waters roam,

and by the fireplace in your chair at home,

and tangled in my heart, this shred of poem.

 

J. Pratt-Walter

6/17/2022 

School Day 2

I was never popular

and no one called me cute

but never did I grab a gun

and then commence to shoot.

 

I didn’t turn to drugs and booze

nor stupefied with dope.

The only help I somehow found

was a secret bowl of hope.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2022

Linked Haiku, Spring

Pink fleece, wool-soft air:

cherry blossoms spread open,

sighing at blue sky.

 

Sometimes transcendence

grows downward beneath your feet

into precious Earth.

 

After blossom-drop

I welcome the glyph of night

as a dark flower.

 

Sighing at blue sky,

I welcome the glyph of night

transcending wool-soft air.

 

J. Pratt-Walter © 2022

Nature's Clockwork

 

Salmon smolts hatch and ride the

flippers of the river rolling to the sea

 

just as the red-mouth suckers

swim upward to tail-turn gravel

and spawn, leaving their DNA as ancient

as being a vertebrate, then feeding the eagles

with their dying.

 

This is the clockwork circle dance of

Nature, calling all to her intricate web

of symbiosis.  Nature tells time

 

only with the eons unfolding

her work, and here, you and I

 

together in this miracle of her art,

riding the complex hands

of Nature’s inscrutable watch.

 

J. Pratt-Walter

NaPoMo 4/12/2022

Holy Week Church Service

After the church service,

the real holiness of the altar is still alive

in the work of women picking up each Communion cup 

with tiny glass clinks, washing and putting away,

in dusting the altar now stripped

of the comforts of the world,

and with the quiet sweeping up of 

candle ash, dirt and dropped Body of Christ

crumbs from pilgrim and priest alike, the peaceful hush

of ashes to ashes, dust to dust with each

tender stroke of the broom.

J. Pratt-Walter, NaPoMo April 2022

As We All Must Do Someday

 

Maybe the long beard of night

is held forever in the obsidian eyes

of a trapped rabbit waiting

for the wolf, holding in the frantic drum

of its heart the knowledge it must stop, yield

to whatever sanctity comes with

letting everything go, as we all must do someday.

 

I don’t know if this is true, but I feel

an echo somewhere inside me that says

when faced with imminent death,

a calm cloak will wrap me in sudden extreme

peace in knowing how the course of things

comes to this last unspeakable moment

 

where questions fall away like those who

escaped fire by plummeting willingly,

like the falling doves of the Triangle Shirtwaist girls

or the brave ones stepping off the edge of the Twin Towers

as their last fierce choice,

with a peace ringing in their heart and looking straight

into the pupils of Mystery claiming them back

as we all must do someday.

J. Pratt-Walter

Like A Miracle

When I hunger for air

it is always there guiding

lungs awake like a miracle.

When I thirst, water

finds my parched mouth

wet as a miracle.

 

When I long for love

it greets me from everything

natural and in the eyes

of my animals sparkling

like a miracle.

 

When life needs living

it’s there inside me, a hearth

and homestead in my heart,

even if I overlooked the miracles

of air, water, nature and

all those loving eyes.

 

J. Pratt-Walter 

4/3/2022 

icon

let us hoist

our words up like

flowers, like flags

alive in their sky,

 

the same sky that rocks

the tenderness of you

as a holy icon

 

which you are.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, NaPoMo 4/3/2022

Night Sky 2

Continents of stars, infinite

stars…Yet I will not bow down

to them.  Instead I will stand in grandeur

like the silver maples whispering

along a favorite path

 

and arch out my limbs

to gather up their lights in the basket

of my mind.

 

The stars are as alive in their

rambles as I am beneath their

sharp glories.  We are shining

together, we are bioluminescent

in this pregnant night where

no questions curdle about if I matter

or not.

 

J. Pratt-Walter

NaPoMo 4/1/2022

Inadequate

 Two lives, fragile

as spiderwebs, light

as dawn’s birdsong

are yanked away with a bomb back

into Mystery.

Crushed pelvis, they said, hip

pulled off its moorage,

 

where the skull of an

almost-born engaged in life’s

potential met the same finish

as that pelvis…a word

better made for berries

pressed into syrup, for grapes

dreaming of wine: crushed.

 

What is lost matters

between two failing pulse-beats,

among disconnected

 

bones,

where ditches of blood

lay open to places sanguinity

should never go,

 

where no poetry is even

slightly

adequate leaking from

my lapsed pen or along

the drowning corners of my eyes.

 

J. Pratt-Walter ©2022

This is about the Ukrainian pregnant woman from a bombed hospital.

First the baby, then the mother died.  Inspired by an AP shot seen round the world.

 

 

 

Float and Fly

The only difference between floating

and flying is what you move through--

sensed from my perspective, a journey begun

so far back, far as life,

maybe farther than time’s wings.

 

In my circle of days, a brain steps sideways

spark by spark, slowly dissolving its own abilities

into a forecast of Dementia soup.

 

I pray some wholeness of Self will recall

how to float on that lake, lost as a nightless moon,

until flight releases me forward, face up

so I can see what comes next.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2022