The All-Miracle Church of Earth

 In our curve of time the framework of Love

is still being dreamt open –

Love seeps and strokes into the wounds of the spirit

like silk blessing the first leaf born of the first bud,

unrolled atop the first root, enshrined from the first Source.

 

Beloved ones precious as air lace our seconds and days together,

a vivid shawl sewn in the cadence of our kaleidoscope souls.

 

The slow streams preach their smooth water-truths,

the snow is its refrain: “Shhh love now, shhh love often”

they whisper to us like salamanders in the shape-shift moments.

 

Love weaves through the gills of our being

alive together on this All-Miracle Church of Earth,

of everything hallowed, brokenly true,

of all things Yes, igniting us while capturing fallen sparks

chimed from the ecstatic tongues of stars.

  

 J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

The Road Home

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

Message to the World NaPoWriMo #4

In the swing of my arms I know

I belong here.  My spirit is alive right here.

My childhood home, the old downtown:

Camas, Washington; Fern Prairie,

Ireland District, our woods –

we can never leave

each other.

Music and art bloom in us like

so many tulips, constellations of fireflies,

a dazzle of autumn leaves.  We construct home

with our arts.

I feel my lungs threshing oxygen

from the precious air.

My heart rocks the cage of my chest –

I look homeward and see forever.

Let us dare to keep on like this.

Friends, this is my real life! It is sacred.

No matter what,

I send my message to the world.

J. Pratt-Walter, 4/4/2020

Kindred

Then I shuttered my eyes to the mundane

and saw living blue flame

rising inside me, then

seeping out through my fingertips.

Then I stripped naked

the curtains from my ears

and heard the flame

calling out to a kindred soul

in the heart of a tiny salamander.

    Our eyes caught and we knew this truth:

What people don’t see or hear

is so much bigger than what 

they caught.

 J. Pratt-Walter, © 2020

She Really Tried

Nature tried to write this poem,

she really tried!

but the men who assailed her hammered

her right down,

her virtues both lush and crisp

sacrificed to the bastards

humping and dumping her precious ways

with thuggish dicks rolled in

vulgar corporate coarseness,

and no words

found their way home to poetry.

She wanted to believe in humans,

she really tried!

but every time she was blasted and fracked,

and for a few months after,

she cried tight immensities of tears

that they refused to hear,

that they never cared about if they did.

She wanted so sharply to be loved,

just to be loved!

Her pink labial flowers and her veiled waters

were just a place to dump jizz,

the fragile fruits of her countless breasts

there to be grappled

by the apes of lust, greed and power,

thrusting the sonnets back down her

sacred wild wellspring,

violated as fuck,

mute as the unearthed seed.

J. Pratt-Walter

© 2/10/2018