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

Should Auld Acquaintance

 I wear my Auld Lang Syne everywhere.

 It lives beneath the boat frame

of my ribs, a secret starfish,

mining the sea of my blood

for boundless light and love.

 

I still hear you, Beloved, across all

the breakneck years, all the miles…

 

Will we ever come through this?

Will we hang on by bloody fingernails of poetry

and a fence of our fierce songs?

We must.

 

We will temper the world’s sadness and fear

with this, our auld acquaintance,

not forgot.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 12/27/2020

All the Modest Miracles

This is the fire

when truth spills out

of a poem.  You were one thing,

but deep with writing, you

become a being aflame.

This is the air

I am exchanging with you.

It has touched everything

on Earth in its own time. It lives in

all the right fires.

We are two pages in a book, stitched

side by side.  Our words are different

but we feed each other

meaning, forking our eyes

at each other’s print,

recognizing the modest miracles

that ask for nothing.

J. Pratt-Walter, (c) 2019

Alder

You are a tree

disguised as a poem.

Can you smell

the first rains of August

licking the dust off

your tired leaves?

Can you feel birds

sharing your branches

with a radical sky?

You are a poem

disguised as a tree.

There you were rooted,

a magnificent alder,

until you gave up your life

to chainsaw and mill

that these words can ramble across

your papery dead body.

J. Pratt-Walter

© 4/12/2019