I Have Never Been a Sailor

I have never been a Sailor

but I feel the sea roiling below me

on a broken-cloud morning.

We have so much to teach

each other, the tides and I—

 

an ocean knows how to never be still,

how to be furiously strong and wild

yet dance so delicately with the moon.

How to hold something up when

it is flotsam. How to claim what sinks.

 

Sea, can you hear me?  I am

singing all the harmonies to the

drum of your pulse.  I can show you

how to wear bones and how to move

through air wearing gravity out loud.

 

I can light fires while you can only extinguish.

See?  I am igniting my curiosity right here

on your sandy shoulder.  Watch me bend down

and silently kneel before your mysteries,

folding my legs like sorrow feels.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023

crucible

listen      the desecrated earth cries out

she heaves in catastrophic tongues

of storms

drought

floods

fires

disease

listen    these are the last moments to act

this is the alarm clock and crucible of endings

this is when the children must teach the adults

there is no option of both survival and failure to act

so pick one, people

choose wisely     not just for yourself

but for all the look-ahead lives to come

 

J. Pratt-Walter NaPoMo 4/1/2023

 

Save These Things Forever

Save the smallest wild things, the overlooked

ordinary things—earthworms, baby birds, moss, deep soil.

Hold safe the green-brown smell of the woods

in spring and fall.  Save all the sequoias.

Keep safe the salamanders in the tiny stream that leaks from

the hillside by my childhood home, save their eggs,

silent as pebbles.

Enfold with safety the magic lanterns of fireflies

and the Aurora Borealis and how my feet sound

sweeping through dry leaves in autumn.

Keep forever the voices of those beloved to me—

save all the unspoken love that overflows the

bucket of my heart.

Save always the sharp awe that envelops me when

in the presence of the still and untamed beings that have been

my true saviors for all my days.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023

tomorrow

tomorrow

i will read the newspaper

thousands dead, the earth shivering

there is no way to save them

 

but for a few.  tomorrow and

the next few days tens of thousands

perish beneath the failure of humans

to care enough to build properly

and the ones still living

 

will need a target for blame

all the dead people lips periwinkle blue

hands gone cold as frozen meat

all the grieving ones the suffering

animals the weary survivors

 

and then, a newborn

pulled from rubble and bent rebar

still wearing her umbilical cord

and we know one tiny miracle

is salvation for the watchers

 

who hear her dusty voice on the news,

the cry heard everywhere we can listen.

 

j. pratt-walter  © 2/22/23

 

By the Forest

Behind the beaver dam, the flatness

of backed water and mud pulls your step up

 short.  Tadpoles ripple like soundwaves.

Once plow horses plodded across this former stream

on a hand-milled lumber bridge

right here. The bones of the mill and the fanged wheel

of its blade have turned to their own graves nearby.

 

God is watching us through the eyes

of heron and newt.

The pileated woodpecker plies

her staccato wooden drum in kinship with us

on a dead fir snag. A sapphire dragonfly

touches down on my arm like a wish,

or perhaps a tiny redemption dressed in blue.

 

The horse spirits look back, rolling the cauldrons

of their cinnamon eyes in surprise -- the place

where dad showed us the very last furrow

they plowed is now a forest

full grown,

and I, even older.

Jennifer Pratt-Walter, © 2016, 2023

Doorway

 

    Peace can slip into your doorway

        when you stop holding on to your war.

          

            J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023

            

          

To Find Meaning

Sometimes it is enough to search outward

into the light for purpose, meaning and truth.

Sometimes we must stand still in the loving darkness

when the light comes searching for us.

 

J. Pratt-Walter, © 2022