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

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

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

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