I Have Never Been a Sailor

I have never been a Sailor

but I feel the sea roiling below me

on a broken-cloud morning.

We have so much to teach

each other, the tides and I—

 

an ocean knows how to never be still,

how to be furiously strong and wild

yet dance so delicately with the moon.

How to hold something up when

it is flotsam. How to claim what sinks.

 

Sea, can you hear me?  I am

singing all the harmonies to the

drum of your pulse.  I can show you

how to wear bones and how to move

through air wearing gravity out loud.

 

I can light fires while you can only extinguish.

See?  I am igniting my curiosity right here

on your sandy shoulder.  Watch me bend down

and silently kneel before your mysteries,

folding my legs like sorrow feels.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023

All the Unmapped Stars

Oh, we see the stars, all right,

their brittle cold mystery

 

but if you took the gentlest

of knives and pushed open

the top of my head like clay,

 

in there are all the warm constellations

one could dream of, a star nesting

in every fingertip, Polaris in each eye,

a Milky Way down my core.

 

Here are all my unmapped stars, the candles

of my small hopes, oh, and look,

there are a few of yours there too!

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2022

You are in My Circle

To Karl A.

 

You wore your grief unseen like

your skeleton: always there but never

directly in view unless you know the landmarks

to watch for after your true love dies.

 

What was it like, your passing?  Did it quietly ring with

Amazing Grace going on ahead?  Did you lean out

of your body, moving like clouds announcing a storm?

Was it like a math equation, never anything

but fixed and perfect?

 

Wherever and whatever you are, (or perhaps

you are undefinable) I am drawing a circle

of gratitude wide enough to encompass your compassion,

all your great glad works lighting our hearts, and more,

I am drawing the hoops and loops that humble and hold us in unity,

to invite one to kindness, to sow peace in an unpeaceful world,

and to affirm that you are magnificently loved

like numbers love their own square root.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, ⓒ 2022

As We All Must Do Someday

 

Maybe the long beard of night

is held forever in the obsidian eyes

of a trapped rabbit waiting

for the wolf, holding in the frantic drum

of its heart the knowledge it must stop, yield

to whatever sanctity comes with

letting everything go, as we all must do someday.

 

I don’t know if this is true, but I feel

an echo somewhere inside me that says

when faced with imminent death,

a calm cloak will wrap me in sudden extreme

peace in knowing how the course of things

comes to this last unspeakable moment

 

where questions fall away like those who

escaped fire by plummeting willingly,

like the falling doves of the Triangle Shirtwaist girls

or the brave ones stepping off the edge of the Twin Towers

as their last fierce choice,

with a peace ringing in their heart and looking straight

into the pupils of Mystery claiming them back

as we all must do someday.

J. Pratt-Walter

Harp of Night

    Over the fields, shielded by deep firs

the Harp of Night awakens.

Autumn darkness fingers the cold strings

and quickens the winds that marvel and moan,

 

to delight and dance and pursue,

to shimmer a heart into ecstasy,

to ladle me into a fathomless well of Mystery.

At twilight I would savor her velvet beauty   

and, placing my hands over her highest strings,

stroke down and down, playing the glissando of

my life as I move through the years

until the deepest strains tally my time.

 

Sometime my Conductor 

will cue from beyond the veiled firs,

me to unbind my final encore 

from the womb of the night’s own harp

until rallentando, decrescendo, finé.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2020