In This Isolation

       Today as the sun lifts there are

not enough Alleluia words.

Outside the door, lilacs wrap me

in a shawl of sweetness.

The horse meets me with a nicker

of gladness.  I open the gate and

she trots through clover alight with dew

that flies from her hoofs in tiny beacons.

The pink azalea shakes her sex-scented skirts.

Solomon’s Seal offers its inverted wine flutes

 beneath an atlas of new leaves.

A late owl croons goodbye to night

and the blue heron croaks back,

waving her wing-wands through the sky.

How the fern heads unroll is a symmetry

almost too perfect to bear.

All is precious in this moment. 

You are precious. We are precious.

We need not regret separation.

Isolation in this Alleluia-morning is a gift.

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2020

In The News

Have you seen how poison gas peels

the flesh off a baby?    

Everything melts away except

for skin under the diaper.

Have you noticed how

a bullet pulls destruction through

all the layers of a child?

These children, our world’s hope,

were too small to know

how full of God they were, 

the pure crystal shimmer,

precious and holy.

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2019