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
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
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
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
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
I want to love like an
amphibian drinking you
through my pores like gleaning
oxygen
from water
precious and divine
I want to love with my
entire being my mind tasting
the rare wit of your life story
my gut recognizing your bright
wise everything-goodness
I want to love like the making
of spring receiving the miracle
of your truest self right into
the grace
of my secret salamander skin
Look, it is raining love
right now
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023
Early morning, the fertile daylight blooms
as song
sparrows praise the sun, these hours
teeming with the Making-Magic of Earth.
Again cottonwood buds
fill the air
with wild perfume. Their
scent is a breath
of honey-sweet potential
and no matter my age,
my heart skips and sings.
Amid Spring’s swelling promise,
the substance
of my soul fills with unspeakable
longing.
Beloved
Mother Earth, so many Springs
have smiled on my face, asking,
angling, softening.
Beltane’s garden sprouts in
the shimmering soil,
opening me again into
possibility’s womb, a young Medusa
singing among her
awakened serpents, Aphrodite
lifting her gown of
flowers with a smile, Artemis
stroking the newborn fawn
she will later hunt.
J. Pratt-Walter © 2023
Save the smallest wild things, the overlooked
ordinary things—earthworms, baby birds, moss, deep soil.
Hold safe the green-brown smell of the woods
in spring and fall.
Save all the sequoias.
Keep safe the salamanders in the tiny stream that leaks from
the hillside by my childhood home, save their eggs,
silent as pebbles.
Enfold with safety the magic lanterns of fireflies
and the Aurora Borealis and how my feet sound
sweeping through dry leaves in autumn.
Keep forever the voices of those beloved to me—
save all the unspoken love that overflows the
bucket of my heart.
Save always the sharp awe that envelops me when
in the presence of the still and untamed beings that have been
my true saviors for all my days.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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 effervescent day
I met you was like my
fingers meeting my thumb
on the same hand
for the very first
time, and bending close
in a pantheon of sparks,
touching into a circle
of infinite marvels and
all possibilities unburied
by shaking out shadows
and finding them to be light.
