Inadequate

 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.

 

 

 

Float and Fly

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

 

CLOAK

My gratitude

is a thick warm cloak

but first I must remember

out of the tangled night

to pull it on.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

Listen

 I can hear it in the silence

of my ancestors.  Between

their stories breathes a

terse quiet

 

too large for mere

words.  They call it

 

the Voice still

and small.  It rings

under my ribs,

 

an unstopped bell

in the center of my

wholeness.

 

It took 60 years to sense

its strange music

 

but I am going along,

and as I go, I listen.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

LANDINGS

How the trees murmur

like serious doves to their

waning leaves in their leaving…

 

You must let go, child.  Fly.

 

Silent as a Sylph the joining breaks,

the umbilical veins from tree to foliage

sever and you can never

 turn back.

Does it hurt to land?

Maybe.  But perhaps no more

than it pains us

to grow.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

PILGRIMAGE

 The wild geese hone their language

over the Columbia slough, spearing the voices

of wildness into my chest, sharp and alive.

If you can marvel with me how

their wild orations turn the season,

you are my kindred Autumn soul.

Come meet me here on the Plains of Untamed

 Mystery.  We need no name for each other

there but friend, but pilgrim, but God.

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021

Infinity

The effervescent day

I met you was like my

fingers meeting my thumb

on the same hand

for the very first

 

time, and bending close

in a pantheon of sparks,

touching into a circle

of infinite marvels and

 

all possibilities unburied

by shaking out shadows

and finding them to be light.

 J. Pratt-Walter, © 2021