It was the usual morning news gone cold
at the reading of it. In the glen the heron
still marches on bent-pencil legs as below,
cut-throat trout watches, dangerously near,
arching her mouth open and closed
with her story on the state of things.
The usual news is heard so often our ears
and eyes have gone cold to all the terror:
Why guns and bombs get made.
How guns and bombs unmake.
J. Pratt-Walter 3/29/2024
Photo by me, Long Beach Peninsula
The old dog is snoring like an oboe. We have so much
comfort, so much gratitude.
But a large piece of wind
plays me the anguish of people like long-distance calls,
extinguished in a midnight vigil where no moon rises,
where daylight is an infinity away. Maybe hope rests,
tingling, in a different neighborhood, one of unknown
zip code. It’s harsh, isn’t it, to keep war’s terrible face
in mind as we share a magnificent meal of plenty
and grace as all the suffering in the world clamors below
every forkful in our home.
The sleeping dog
moans. If I were a person
of shallow religion I might quote
unfounded platitudes here about “working in mysterious
ways” or “everything happens for a reason”
as videos are blurred so all of us screen-watchers
drift past the horrors like a susurration of so many
starlings.
Can we grasp the entire picture? This is how we have to do
it
in America, with mouths full of unblinking compassion.
With holes in our collective stockings of serving ourselves
first.
With hearts the size of suffering nations holding onto every
beat toward peace.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023
Two lives, fragile
as spiderwebs, light
as dawn’s birdsong
are yanked away with a bomb back
into Mystery.
Crushed pelvis, they said, hip
pulled off its moorage,
where the skull of an
almost-born engaged in life’s
potential met the same finish
as that pelvis…a word
better made for berries
pressed into syrup, for grapes
dreaming of wine: crushed.
What is lost matters
between two failing pulse-beats,
among disconnected
bones,
where ditches of blood
lay open to places sanguinity
should never go,
where no poetry is even
slightly
adequate leaking from
my lapsed pen or along
the drowning corners of my eyes.
J. Pratt-Walter ©2022
This is about the Ukrainian pregnant woman from a bombed
hospital.
First the baby, then the mother died. Inspired by an AP shot seen round the world.
