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

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

CHURCHES

Your church steepled itself

at theirs, and theirs towered

its weight over yours.

His church walled itself

against hers, and her church

felt so small it waned like the moon

to invisibility,

and way over there

they yoked their church

to the worst god ever

while even farther,

bombs and guns were named

god.

Meanwhile, my church is

voicing the breeding frogs

and making the trees

to bloom.

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2019