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

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

Island

Even if you are an island,

you are never alone, for the glad seas

tumble around you.  Even when the waves

are enraged, they seek refuge

on your shore.

You are kin of the clean bold air.

The moon and sun smile down, and seabirds

sing your names round about you.

If you feel abandoned, let your lungs

take in the living sky.

Feel the holiness of your ground

molded around you, and listen for seabirds

singing your names.

J. Pratt-Walter

2/27/2019

Quilt of Sound

Mom made quilts the way I write music –

colors coursing along and turning to face

new and unexpected friends,

each shade and chime an atlas

of melody and harmony cupped in union.

Mom started very simply –

ten rows of six by six blocks,

leftover fabrics from sewing our clothes.

But Nine-Patch gave itself over to Friendship Star

to Drunkard’s Path in its labyrinthine circus.

I heard the simplest melodies

skating along in my thoughts,

then built a forest of music and rhythm

bowing under its own weight to touch the Earth

or offering itself to skies and fires and hearts.

Eventually, quilt or song, they mapped a new universe

stringing dissonance in its angular way

to pools of consonance, to a divine resolution

or not.

And my songs now?  Their notes hover over the quilts

and touch down like larkspur petals,

like an eyelash, like moth tracks,

a fabric of air woven upon my harp saying

“Hi, mom.  I will always remember you.”

J. Pratt-Walter, (c) 2018

DRAB

       That gray and brown junco

crouching plain as sand in the

winter-nude branch of the quince

never gets the compliments.

I mean, really, who ever says

“Your being drab is so lovely”?

Bindweed, the morning glory:

you dig and toil to rid your garden of it.

Do you ever see how glorious it is

all on its own, it’s pale and artful face

revolving to the sunrise?

Those small tan slugs sliding

through the strawberry leaves:

I bet you never thanked them 
for their thoughtful
recycling of organic matter.  Earth does.

See the junco in her shaded perfection.

Marvel at the bindweed in its unfolding.

Thank the slugs, for they remake the world.

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2019

Dark Sermon

Tonight I am tall

with wildness

and the shadows tell me

what the light cannot preach.

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2018

Winter’s Eye

        I look Winter 

right into his frosty eye

but I don’t see emptiness;

there is not one bleak hour.

No, he is filled toe to crown

with all the potential of a year

and a teeming willingness

to let it go, to give it all up to the

tumpeting needs of everythingness

just waiting to happen.

J. Pratt-Walter

(c) 1/5/2019