Your Beauty

I adore how you wear beauty

in crinkles around your eyes

so that the beauty you see becomes

part of your face.

 

That’s how I want to love –

with my heart as receptive

as your eyes.

 

J. Pratt-Walter 

© 2022

You are in My Circle

To Karl A.

 

You wore your grief unseen like

your skeleton: always there but never

directly in view unless you know the landmarks

to watch for after your true love dies.

 

What was it like, your passing?  Did it quietly ring with

Amazing Grace going on ahead?  Did you lean out

of your body, moving like clouds announcing a storm?

Was it like a math equation, never anything

but fixed and perfect?

 

Wherever and whatever you are, (or perhaps

you are undefinable) I am drawing a circle

of gratitude wide enough to encompass your compassion,

all your great glad works lighting our hearts, and more,

I am drawing the hoops and loops that humble and hold us in unity,

to invite one to kindness, to sow peace in an unpeaceful world,

and to affirm that you are magnificently loved

like numbers love their own square root.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, ⓒ 2022

Playing the Game

“Chess--I know how to play,

but not how to win.”

     -Overheard at a restaurant

 

The rules of this chess flew like circling hawks,

landing here and there when invoked

or hovering above, ready to assert themselves

as needed until the game was won.

 

But the game was for other people,

the pretty ones, the popular, me being

the wallflower shuffling like an abandoned cat

at the margin of the high school dance

throbbing in the gym after a football game,

the slippery eel of self-doubt hooked in my throat.

The playbook for this chess was not in my library.

 

I suffered outside the flirt game, and even more

for actual romance: prom, his arms encircling my waist,

mine curled around his neck in that longed-for

slow dance, low lights and music pushing, pushing lips

into kisses, the extravagant touching claimed by others

who knew how to win that game.

 

These days I play solo chess with no rules

but my own.  I’m still that strange wallflower

but I know how to walk alone, I give myself permission

to dance.  I plow and seed my own land,

 I mule along outside of that old game. 

The regrets clank on in a black alley inside me

with neither welcome nor map. But maybe that’s me

discovering another way to win.

 

J. Pratt-Walter (c) 2022

                                                                  The Wallflower

  

Sonnet 50

Do flowers know the mystery of roots

or snow the droplet-dancing of the thaw?

Do morning birds hear poetry in their flutes,

do trees cry out when bitten by the saw?

 

Do caterpillars sense cocoons ahead

to shed their land-locked lives as left for dead?

Do honeybees rejoice to find their hive

when pollen-laden, wings spread wide to life?

 

 No questions from the tally of our days

or where or how they close inside the gloam --

I recall you everywhere sun plays,

and all the places laughing waters roam,

and by the fireplace in your chair at home,

and tangled in my heart, this shred of poem.

 

J. Pratt-Walter

6/17/2022 

School Day 2

I was never popular

and no one called me cute

but never did I grab a gun

and then commence to shoot.

 

I didn’t turn to drugs and booze

nor stupefied with dope.

The only help I somehow found

was a secret bowl of hope.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2022

Linked Haiku, Spring

Pink fleece, wool-soft air:

cherry blossoms spread open,

sighing at blue sky.

 

Sometimes transcendence

grows downward beneath your feet

into precious Earth.

 

After blossom-drop

I welcome the glyph of night

as a dark flower.

 

Sighing at blue sky,

I welcome the glyph of night

transcending wool-soft air.

 

J. Pratt-Walter © 2022

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