how gently
the world unfolds me
around the edges
of my life
i hear the
sublime beauty purring
in the simplest
of things
the leaves of your eyes
your stubby fingernails
your green scent
i have dog-eared
all the pages
of our shared days
to keep you near
Two snowy egrets are a slash of beauty
in the heart of the lake in the heart of the glen.
They step—step--step, eyes nailing the depths.
Two white birds paint wavering echoes in the water.
Sun-turned morning glories sing back their glow,
swinging open to the potential of day on the shore.
Somewhere close, a little girl feels their beauty so
hard,
she aches for something beyond language, wider than oxygen.
Egrets flex and extend the machinery of their legs,
prying the shallows for life that brings them life:
the fish, the frogs. The lake in the glen chimes with
flowers
and birds and captures the slow faces of clouds.
The little girl inhales the breath of lake, plants, sun.
She lives in the body of an old woman.
Mud strokes her bare feet, cattails sway beneath
dragonflies.
If only she could dwell inside this magic all the time.
For a few moments, the entire world rests
in perfect balance between itself and a forgotten child.
For a few moments, a melancholy girl with a heart too broken
to hold all her love inside becomes a white egret, asking
for
nothing more than this wet moment in this very place.
In wonder, she spreads wide her wings.
Jennifer Pratt-Walter, ⓒ 2024
Begin at the highest summit and think downward.
Above: light to dark and back. Within you, your animal-sized
land
and sea. Life moves in your body in sentient streams.
Thank each plant for the treasure of oxygen. Feel
the gifts of plants in the yielding corners of your lungs.
Thank each animal for the lessons it teaches.
Remember wildness rocking in the soul of the tamed.
Ease your attention to the workings of your heart.
Red springs of life-force whip through your blood;
you recognize life as belonging to all who inherit its
alchemy.
Invisible birds move in your body carrying in their beaks
strands of connection between all things that cannot be cut.
Your feet send movable roots into the ground everywhere you step.
Down through each layer of the planet, time’s signature speaks.
You enter the ultimate deepness in Earth’s core, the bass roar
of magma
shifting like a fiery herd of mastodons.
You know yourself to be as fragile as a filament of silk.
Jennifer Pratt-Walter, © 2024
I
was knowledge
before
I was made
now resting
in the red apple of
my ♥
I am an urn holding
the entire sea
waves are my thoughts
storming to be
born
again and again
until
I get it right
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2024
before i go i want
to gaze at the garnet bodies
of wild strawberries so humble
in the dirt
i want to bend my knees
onto the sweet sweet ground
i want to feel round redness
between my fingers
soft as oxygen
i want to eat their simple humility
and find it
delicious
j. pratt-walter. ⓒ 2024
It was the usual morning news gone cold
at the reading of it. In the glen the heron
still marches on bent-pencil legs as below,
cut-throat trout watches, dangerously near,
arching her mouth open and closed
with her story on the state of things.
The usual news is heard so often our ears
and eyes have gone cold to all the terror:
Why guns and bombs get made.
How guns and bombs unmake.
J. Pratt-Walter 3/29/2024
Photo by me, Long Beach Peninsula
This is what we were created for, Crones!
Children grown, society and workplace duties
all behind us. Sterling wisdom—awake!
Our world needs us to stand tall as Sequoia, to remember
and strive for justice, to fight for critical change.
To heal.
Let us claim our wisdom, turn loose our Kraken-powers
against the assault of Mother Earth. We all know
what is wrong.
Everything we do matters.
Everything.
Raise our collective voices! Come Crones and Spinsters,
come Grandmothers and Hags!
This is our moment,
this is our planet: caring together with purpose.
The shoulders of time are calling us to stand upon their
height--
This is what we were made for, Sisters!
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2024
Photo by JPW, Pride Parade
May you sleep the sleep of my old dog,
soft, yielding and unquestioning.
May peace sift through your body
like a whisper, riding on
the white fur
of a dog's love.
May you receive the adoration
you need, the saintly love of
canines,
unceasing: forward, backward and right now,
ready to guide you through the
Mystery
and all the joy and grief dogs already understand
in every snuffle in their body.
J. Pratt-Walter, 2/16/2024
FIRST POEM
this is how
love makes invisible marks
on the vivid heart
beyond the heart,
how our hallelujah blood
hallows, --o joy—everything!
two of us evolving to a single
legs-arms-necks-lips knotwork
passion of starved skin,
these hands
an untimid touch
these breasts was pink ever so pink?
i am drawn and colored
everywhere by your love-
artistry
eyes become sighs and
breathe yes,
our story still plays inside me
nothing but you, eyes like
springtime
even your homely feet wear
my love stamped into their
soles
from the ancestors to me to you,
glorious day of days! is any day!
holding dearly you
inside it
j. pratt-walter, 2/13/2024
make
the heart
everything
passion
pink-colored
artistry
sighs
yes
nothing
but you
love
glorious
dearly
you
j. pratt-walter 2/14/24
This is the sacrament of being together
in our shared time. This is it. This is real.
Nothing extraneous, no barriers.
Nothing craved and nothing
missing.
Just water, sky and land
and how the world lifts birds
to flight. Just soil and rain reviving
a parched earthworm and tending
all the dropped seeds, all the daylight
words
I hold for you right here in my workaday hands,
no worries or blame to intrude,
only the remarkable grace of two
beings leaning
into each other like this. We smile and take
a slow breath, knowing that we
recognize
a sacrament when we’re in it.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2024
how? in the glitter-snow and
iron-ice no warmly
but world-tilt
sun-milk
below arrowhead
stars,
a small simmer
.
how? earthworm snout
starts her plow,
tilling the yarn
of earth with her gut.
sky drip behind the
untils,
until a code robin sings and
.
now o patient seed labor open
. . .thy husk
now in the hunger of animals
eggs unroll into flower
buds
fallingly into almost near-
. . .spring
j. pratt-walter, © 2024
In the red and white church of
my bones I carry the matrix of
small ministries:
I sing to all kinds of babies,
curving my air into the
tiny spoons of their ears;
I pick up so carefully
each eyeless jewel of an
earthworm caught on cement
and return it to the sentient
soil;
I speak greenly like daylight to
plants; I always try to comfort a
hurting animal, even
invertebrates.
And I look back with staggering love
at the silent lost child I was
and tell her she is so precious.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2024
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
How can I hold fear,
how can sadness dim the day
when I step into the beauty of this
gleaming new dawn?
The fulcrum of the Earth tilts
toward goodness and I will
ride along, drinking deep the hours,
worshipping as if this were my
last chance.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023
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
They say to never give your
whole heart, but I’ve
a heart for every age
I’ve been and I’ve given
every single one of them
to love, all for love,
and I would give
them all again.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023
In an old forest, the tree canopy and trunks
get all the glory, the mainmast
and sails in a
great ship of brown and
green.
The forest floor is mycorrhizal
connections,
a fungal nervous system veining soil and
water.
The understory
is an unsung margin where one
ecology touches
another as an in-between, not
claiming much sky
or soil but joining both.
Come pause there with me in a
hymn-green
circle of moss embracing the friable
ground
where smooth white quartz pebbles
wait like punctuation.
Wild roses and salal leaves like
ears become low sanctuary walls,
and a ring of attentive fir trees
holds us in from the beyond.
If I take your hand and lead you
in, know that you
are quietly treasured. My eyes were lit to tell you this.
There a stump waits as a seat where
we balance
the goodness of this afternoon
against the
mixed choir of feelings we carry like so much wood.
Here we are greenly blessed. Here the rest of the world
is silenced. Here time has flowed off to change
into something more comforting,
and so will I, even if it is just soft eyes and a kind word
as we sit back-to-back on this margin
of connection:
Yes, there is this
understory reaching between us.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023
I pulled on a sweater of an amazing woman
who died. Hot pink,
comfortably broken in.
I liked this color better on Mom, it said. It’s not
your shade. Aw,
come on.
And her bustline?
So much more forward than yours,
like her great heart.
More.
I’ll wear it anyway, careful to be respectful.
I’m a neutral in training for hot pink.
As I placed the pointy elf hat on my head,
a pink chuckle. Yes, wear the hat. The world needs
more hilarity.
I agree. And it goes
with my hilarious new glasses.
Hmmph.
Child, I guarantee you’ll have more gumption with us, the
sweater said
begrudgingly. I guess you’ll do.
But Christ, don’t even THINK about wearing
the wild shamrock socks!
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023
If we rebirth, do we also
redeath? Let’s consider that
and what meaning it could bring--
and what is either but a mirror
and passage
to the other, a sly animated
palindrome on acts of life and time?
No matter what, I want
to be born anew with you.
I want to die again and again
with always always you.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023
We sit on the porch and watch the sun harvest the last
of the light, you here because I pulled you outside to quietly
ponder the feel of time stroking
our arms.
I would gladly trade a year of my
life just to sit
on this porch with you, breathing
in the mimosa flowers,
the old white dog shedding her
hair all over our feet.
I would lean back in grandpa’s
wooden chair not minding
the hardness because you are near,
and hear the first cricket of summer
begin his luminous song.
We could sit here remembering the
weight of all our years,
then, a meteor! And our hands would reach out to each other,
fingers linking as if they had minds
of their own.
J. Pratt-Walter, ⓒ 2023
