Understory

 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

Toward Goodness: A Poem for Solstice

How can I feel 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, I will open, worshipping as if

this is our last day.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023

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

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 

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

In Silence

It is ok to love quietly

like air loves a secret scent,

like a bud breaks out in stillness,

like a starfish sings to god.

In silence is healing--

cells rebuild in tenderness,

soundless as the moon,

as silent as the pen

trailing these words behind,

quietly loving.

J. Pratt-Walter

copyright 2020

Holding Water with Open Fingers NaPoWriMo #15

To the Maker:

Send us your mercy.

We desperately seek that place

where awareness lives.  We

need each other beneath your blanket of sky.


We need you, Plant and Animal People,

we need you, living Air and Water,

 we need you, Soil that cups our feet.

we need you, Fire of justice.

Roll healing down like sun after thunder,

like rain in the dry-blind desert.


We try to hold love to ourselves like a

possession.  But it’s grasping moonlight,

it’s trying to hold water with open fingers.

Let us feel the rainwater as it dances upon us.

Let us drink, share and savor the taste,

knowing we taste the tip of heaven.

J. Pratt-Walter 4/14/2020

Alder

You are a tree

disguised as a poem.

Can you smell

the first rains of August

licking the dust off

your tired leaves?

Can you feel birds

sharing your branches

with a radical sky?

You are a poem

disguised as a tree.

There you were rooted,

a magnificent alder,

until you gave up your life

to chainsaw and mill

that these words can ramble across

your papery dead body.

J. Pratt-Walter

© 4/12/2019