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
Over the fields, shielded by deep firs
the Harp of Night awakens.
Autumn darkness fingers the cold
strings
and quickens the winds that marvel
and moan,
to delight and dance and pursue,
to shimmer a heart into ecstasy,
to ladle me into a fathomless well of Mystery.
At twilight I would savor her velvet
beauty
and, placing my hands over her
highest strings,
stroke down and down, playing
the glissando of
my life as I move through the
years
until the deepest strains tally
my time.
Sometime my Conductor
will cue from beyond the veiled firs,
me to unbind my final encore
from the womb of the night’s own harp
until rallentando, decrescendo, finé.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2020
I feel
a small injured bird fluttering
in the heart of
my heart
The great ship of Earth
plows on
unmindful of bird, flutter
or pulse
She herself is hurting
an unseen broken winged
creature, sick
and so
alone
Humans are the weapons
that infect, ignite and
wring the life out of our planet
My eyes burn with rivers
and oh, my heart
Mother Earth, my heart
how it shakes
J. Pratt-Walter © 2020
