. . .near-spring

how?  in the glitter-snow and

     iron-ice no warmly

but world-tilt    sun-milk

     below arrowhead stars,

a small simmer

.

how? earthworm snout

     starts her plow, tilling the yarn

of earth with her gut.

    sky drip behind the untils,

until a code robin sings and

.

now o patient seed labor open

    . . .thy husk

now in the hunger of animals

     eggs unroll into flower buds

fallingly into almost near-

     . . .spring

j. pratt-walter, © 2024

Garden of Beltane

 

Early morning, the fertile daylight blooms

       as song sparrows praise the sun, these hours

       teeming with the Making-Magic of Earth.

 

Again cottonwood buds fill the air

with wild perfume. Their scent is a breath

of honey-sweet potential and no matter my age,

my heart skips and sings.

 

Amid Spring’s swelling promise, the substance

of my soul fills with unspeakable longing.

       Beloved Mother Earth, so many Springs

have smiled on my face, asking, angling, softening.

 

Beltane’s garden sprouts in the shimmering soil,

opening me again into possibility’s womb, a young Medusa

singing among her awakened serpents, Aphrodite

lifting her gown of flowers with a smile, Artemis

stroking the newborn fawn she will later hunt.

 

J. Pratt-Walter © 2023

Linked Haiku, Spring

Pink fleece, wool-soft air:

cherry blossoms spread open,

sighing at blue sky.

 

Sometimes transcendence

grows downward beneath your feet

into precious Earth.

 

After blossom-drop

I welcome the glyph of night

as a dark flower.

 

Sighing at blue sky,

I welcome the glyph of night

transcending wool-soft air.

 

J. Pratt-Walter © 2022

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

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

An Unordinary Easter NaPoWriMo #12

I walk alone beside the stream heavy with dread that

I can’t shut down: angry at, afraid of

the toxic political maelstrom infecting our nation


but what use is my worry to the creek?

Down there in the shallows

sea-run cutthroat trout are spawning,

spangling in sun spikes through shade,

careless of the state of the world.


Along the way, alders dangle their catkins

and whisper pink into their first leaf-buds.

Maples hang their chartreuse bloom to the winds,

unconcerned of the shocking events:

Corporations before people.  Death to the uncounted poor

and the brown.  Children caged.

The business of money above the needs of life.


Where the stream opens into a small glen resting

between two hills, the water slows as it snakes along.

Eagles line its curves, picking off the spawn-weary fish

who give themselves up in the old way


but what use is my despair in the habits of

eagles and fish?  I want to tell them that what I seek

cannot be found among the roads of humans.

That I find solace in how my senses note

 such ordinary things as bud-break, of fish scales

silvering under the sun, of maple pollen

erasing the clarity of my windshield, of how it feels

to grasp dinner in your talons.

How it is to easily give up your life when

laying or fertilizing eggs defines your purpose.


From the bank I release a tiny boat,

a half of a walnut shell.  If I could place my fears

in its hold, I would, but what are fears to a seed remembering

its wooden nature?  Let it run on

past the fish and trees, let it bob untouched

by eagles.  It is Easter


but what use is a day of resurrection

when the planet and its beings are the sacrifice?


J. Pratt-Walter
4/12/2020

CHURCHES

Your church steepled itself

at theirs, and theirs towered

its weight over yours.

His church walled itself

against hers, and her church

felt so small it waned like the moon

to invisibility,

and way over there

they yoked their church

to the worst god ever

while even farther,

bombs and guns were named

god.

Meanwhile, my church is

voicing the breeding frogs

and making the trees

to bloom.

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2019