Life is like a window exposed gradually
by the tide, and you, not seeing
ahead, trusting
the wisdom of flowing.
You may not know where currents
will lead in their curious compulsions.
You may not even know
if you are the ship or the sea,
a reader of heaven’s oracular map
or a sailor lost beneath the waves there
in the hold of the deep, who, when reaching
for the moon’s pale smile, finally learns to swim.
Jennifer Pratt-Walter, © 2020
Look at my hands,
all the wide years penned into an
atlas of wrinkles,
blue snakes of veining, scars
where blood
spilled its iron for a cause.
Look at my palm, then
turn it over to see rough-knuckle
memories
going back and back to the time
of all the grandmothers and great
grandmothers
for as long as there have been
hands.
Through me the ancestors still
feel the living soil,
they hum to a newborn with a poem
of holding,
they cradle a beloved face at the
last breath.
Their lives are printed upon all
my cells,
they speak from inside with every
gesture,
behind every grasp, scrape,
caress.
Look at my hands, how they have
been reborn
in my children, still holding the
pencil
that writes the next story.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021
Justice for Women
is Justice for Mother Earth,
and too great for mere words,
but our XX
Chromosome power
has been fallowing
for generations.
We are the lips to
Pandora’s riotous box.
We are stretching up
and primed
to spear her light
scribing it into our
collective mythology
for healing,
our dazzling souls
unleashed, flung
wide open with the lightning
of our XX convictions.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021
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
Small brown thrush
with injured wings—
the cat brought her in,
such delicate things
and as she dies,
oh, how she sings.
J. Pratt-Walter, (c) 2021
I wear my Auld Lang Syne everywhere.
It lives beneath the boat frame
of my ribs,
a secret starfish,
mining the
sea of my blood
for boundless
light and love.
I still hear
you, Beloved, across all
the
breakneck years, all the miles…
Will we ever
come through this?
Will we hang
on by bloody fingernails of poetry
and a fence of our fierce songs?
We must.
We will temper
the world’s sadness and fear
with this, our auld acquaintance,
not forgot.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 12/27/2020
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
