ALTAR: The Last Poem of 2023

Can you see that my entire body

is an altar?  My eyes are lit candles,

my lungs breathe out hope’s incense. 

My heart is a shaman’s drum pulsing

out life’s daily rhythm, tempered

with a searing chalice of honesty

lettered in my blood.

 

It is New Year’s Eve, yet the graceful snake

of each minute, every butterfly second

circles on time’s perpetual altar cloth

as each pregnant moment births its own

new year and another chance to do

what is right and true in what will become

the Auld Lang Syne of your times.

 

So what gifts will you set on your cloth?

Will your hands and feet be an offering

and landmark of accountability and compassion?

In the tilting lever of our days, be an altar.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 12/31/2023

With You

 If we rebirth, do we also

redeath? Let’s consider that

and what meaning it could bring--

 

and what is either but a mirror and passage

to the other, a sly animated

palindrome on acts of life and time?

 

No matter what, I want

to be born anew with you.

I want to die again and again

with always always you.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023

Nature's Clockwork

 

Salmon smolts hatch and ride the

flippers of the river rolling to the sea

 

just as the red-mouth suckers

swim upward to tail-turn gravel

and spawn, leaving their DNA as ancient

as being a vertebrate, then feeding the eagles

with their dying.

 

This is the clockwork circle dance of

Nature, calling all to her intricate web

of symbiosis.  Nature tells time

 

only with the eons unfolding

her work, and here, you and I

 

together in this miracle of her art,

riding the complex hands

of Nature’s inscrutable watch.

 

J. Pratt-Walter

NaPoMo 4/12/2022

Float and Fly

The only difference between floating

and flying is what you move through--

sensed from my perspective, a journey begun

so far back, far as life,

maybe farther than time’s wings.

 

In my circle of days, a brain steps sideways

spark by spark, slowly dissolving its own abilities

into a forecast of Dementia soup.

 

I pray some wholeness of Self will recall

how to float on that lake, lost as a nightless moon,

until flight releases me forward, face up

so I can see what comes next.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2022

 

Last Waltz

How my body 

wants to waltz!

Now, when the wild lupin lifts

its blue triumph over the tipsy

orchard grass,

now as the tiger lilies flex their

orange arms.

Now, as cherry blossoms

feather their way to the ground,

hinting of the lips of fruit

almost too rich to bear,

let us waltz this one warm river away from any clock,

hands so alive, feet

haunting the floor with yearning

for more –

one last sunset time before the metallic

broken bell of parting.

J. Pratt-Walter, (c)2019

The Tally of the Days

What does 60 years get you

but the thrumming tides of a heart

almost too full of thanks

to keep beating?

Sometimes these todays,

sometimes the click of years gone by

seem like a cryptic wound where

pain lives, hidden deep in your roots  –

you feel at once the burdens,

the joys and levity of life like flowers before

the rational mind ever notices.

Looking back, I welcome them

equally.

Be careful where you walk –

Love has spilled over when and where-

ever our shadows met and touched,

even almost 60 years later.

J. Pratt-Walter, © 4/8/2019

NaPoWriMo day #8

Ribbon of Time

 

       There’s this place

I want to go first,

       somewhere and 
       
       somewhen.

It’s just a marker

on a thin ribbon

of time

when you first came into

being.

The second place

I want to go

is where we are

when we step off

that ribbon

together.

       J. Pratt-Walter (c) 2019

The Old House

Houses wear their history like a shawl,

draped loosely, with a

pin of years to hold it together.

Those voices?  Your mother, your father?

All gone like a late snow,

and now your own words, dispersing like wood-smoke

clocking all your years.

Feel the night

walk softly as a fawn through doors

and peer at itself

through midnight-blind windows.

Hear it husking though the old wood furnace,

counting all your steps and your time

until the patient end.

J. Pratt-Walter © 2018