After the church service,
the real holiness of the
altar is still alive
in the work of women picking up each Communion cup
with tiny glass clinks, washing and putting away,
in dusting the altar now stripped
of the comforts of the world,
and with the quiet sweeping up of
candle ash, dirt and dropped Body of Christ
crumbs from pilgrim and priest alike,
the peaceful hush
of ashes to ashes, dust to dust
with each
tender stroke of the broom.
J. Pratt-Walter, NaPoMo April 2022
Maybe the long beard of night
is held forever in the obsidian eyes
of a trapped rabbit waiting
for the wolf, holding in the frantic drum
of its heart the knowledge it must stop, yield
to whatever sanctity comes with
letting everything go, as we all must do someday.
I don’t know if this is true, but I feel
an echo somewhere inside me that says
when faced with imminent death,
a calm cloak will wrap me in sudden extreme
peace in knowing how the course of things
comes to this last unspeakable moment
where questions fall away like those who
escaped fire by plummeting willingly,
like the falling doves of the Triangle Shirtwaist girls
or the brave ones stepping off the edge of the Twin Towers
as their last fierce choice,
with a peace ringing in their heart and looking straight
into the pupils of Mystery claiming them back
as we all must do someday.
J. Pratt-Walter
When I hunger for air
it is always there guiding
lungs awake like a miracle.
When I thirst, water
finds my parched mouth
wet as a miracle.
When I long for love
it greets me from everything
natural and in the eyes
of my animals sparkling
like a miracle.
When life needs living
it’s there inside me, a hearth
and homestead in my heart,
even if I overlooked the miracles
of air, water, nature and
all those loving eyes.
J. Pratt-Walter
4/3/2022
let us hoist
our words up like
flowers, like flags
alive in their sky,
the same sky that rocks
the tenderness of you
as a holy icon
which you are.
J. Pratt-Walter, NaPoMo 4/3/2022
Continents of stars, infinite
stars…Yet I will not bow down
to them. Instead I
will stand in grandeur
like the silver maples whispering
along a favorite path
and arch out my limbs
to gather up their lights in the basket
of my mind.
The stars are as alive in their
rambles as I am beneath their
sharp glories. We are shining
together, we are bioluminescent
in this pregnant night where
no questions curdle about if I matter
or not.
J. Pratt-Walter
NaPoMo 4/1/2022
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.
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
