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
Two snowy egrets are a slash of beauty
in the heart of the lake in the heart of the glen.
They step—step--step, eyes nailing the depths.
Two white birds paint wavering echoes in the water.
Sun-turned morning glories sing back their glow,
swinging open to the potential of day on the shore.
Somewhere close, a little girl feels their beauty so
hard,
she aches for something beyond language, wider than oxygen.
Egrets flex and extend the machinery of their legs,
prying the shallows for life that brings them life:
the fish, the frogs. The lake in the glen chimes with
flowers
and birds and captures the slow faces of clouds.
The little girl inhales the breath of lake, plants, sun.
She lives in the body of an old woman.
Mud strokes her bare feet, cattails sway beneath
dragonflies.
If only she could dwell inside this magic all the time.
For a few moments, the entire world rests
in perfect balance between itself and a forgotten child.
For a few moments, a melancholy girl with a heart too broken
to hold all her love inside becomes a white egret, asking
for
nothing more than this wet moment in this very place.
In wonder, she spreads wide her wings.
Jennifer Pratt-Walter, ⓒ 2024
It was the usual morning news gone cold
at the reading of it. In the glen the heron
still marches on bent-pencil legs as below,
cut-throat trout watches, dangerously near,
arching her mouth open and closed
with her story on the state of things.
The usual news is heard so often our ears
and eyes have gone cold to all the terror:
Why guns and bombs get made.
How guns and bombs unmake.
J. Pratt-Walter 3/29/2024
Photo by me, Long Beach Peninsula
This is what we were created for, Crones!
Children grown, society and workplace duties
all behind us. Sterling wisdom—awake!
Our world needs us to stand tall as Sequoia, to remember
and strive for justice, to fight for critical change.
To heal.
Let us claim our wisdom, turn loose our Kraken-powers
against the assault of Mother Earth. We all know
what is wrong.
Everything we do matters.
Everything.
Raise our collective voices! Come Crones and Spinsters,
come Grandmothers and Hags!
This is our moment,
this is our planet: caring together with purpose.
The shoulders of time are calling us to stand upon their
height--
This is what we were made for, Sisters!
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2024
Photo by JPW, Pride Parade
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
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
listen the desecrated earth cries out
she heaves in catastrophic tongues
of storms
drought
floods
fires
disease
listen these are the last moments to act
this is the alarm clock and
crucible of endings
this is when the children must
teach the adults
there is no option of both survival
and failure to act
so pick one, people
choose wisely not just for yourself
but for all the look-ahead lives
to come
J. Pratt-Walter NaPoMo 4/1/2023
Behind the beaver dam, the flatness
of backed water and mud pulls your step up
short. Tadpoles ripple like soundwaves.
Once plow horses plodded across this former stream
on a hand-milled lumber bridge
right here. The bones of the mill and the fanged wheel
of its blade have turned to their own graves nearby.
God is watching us through the eyes
of heron and newt.
The pileated woodpecker plies
her staccato wooden drum in kinship with us
on a dead fir snag. A sapphire dragonfly
touches down on my arm like a wish,
or perhaps a tiny redemption dressed in blue.
The horse spirits look back, rolling the cauldrons
of their cinnamon eyes in surprise -- the place
where dad showed us the very last furrow
they plowed is now a forest
full grown,
and I, even older.
Jennifer Pratt-Walter, © 2016, 2023
Salmon smolts hatch and ride the
flippers of the river rolling to the sea
just as the red-mouth suckers
swim upward to tail-turn gravel
and spawn, leaving their DNA as ancient
as being a vertebrate, then feeding the eagles
with their dying.
This is the clockwork circle dance of
Nature, calling all to her intricate web
of symbiosis. Nature
tells time
only with the eons unfolding
her work, and here, you and I
together in this miracle of her art,
riding the complex hands
of Nature’s inscrutable watch.
J. Pratt-Walter
NaPoMo 4/12/2022
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
Continents of stars, infinite
stars…Yet I will not bow down
to them. Instead I
will stand in grandeur
like the silver maples whispering
along a favorite path
and arch out my limbs
to gather up their lights in the basket
of my mind.
The stars are as alive in their
rambles as I am beneath their
sharp glories. We are shining
together, we are bioluminescent
in this pregnant night where
no questions curdle about if I matter
or not.
J. Pratt-Walter
NaPoMo 4/1/2022
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
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| Her small prophet |
