I Have Never Been a Sailor

I have never been a Sailor

but I feel the sea roiling below me

on a broken-cloud morning.

We have so much to teach

each other, the tides and I—

 

an ocean knows how to never be still,

how to be furiously strong and wild

yet dance so delicately with the moon.

How to hold something up when

it is flotsam. How to claim what sinks.

 

Sea, can you hear me?  I am

singing all the harmonies to the

drum of your pulse.  I can show you

how to wear bones and how to move

through air wearing gravity out loud.

 

I can light fires while you can only extinguish.

See?  I am igniting my curiosity right here

on your sandy shoulder.  Watch me bend down

and silently kneel before your mysteries,

folding my legs like sorrow feels.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023

In the Arms of the Deep

     We are the secret radical hopers

gathering dreams in our nets and letting them go

in the same liminal moment.

 

Our ship has rudder and sails

but they are useless when the sea is stacked

so tall against us.  Still, we must move on.

 

Love comes in with the tide

but we, the explorers, cannot predict when

or from where it flows, not by moon-clock,

not by the hidden language of our bodies or stars,

 

but by its own curious compulsions.

Sometimes we are lifted light as foam on

the crest of life.  Sometimes we are night’s own anchor.

Sometimes we are lost at sea, praying like a jellyfish on the strand,

crying out for saltwater solace in the arms of the deep.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, (c) 2020