the pages of my days

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

 

Summer Night on the Porch

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

By the Forest

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

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 Old House

Houses wear their history like a shawl,

draped loosely, with a

pin of years to hold it together.

Those voices?  Your mother, your father?

All gone like a late snow,

and now your own words, dispersing like wood-smoke

clocking all your years.

Feel the night

walk softly as a fawn through doors

and peer at itself

through midnight-blind windows.

Hear it husking though the old wood furnace,

counting all your steps and your time

until the patient end.

J. Pratt-Walter © 2018