May you sleep the sleep of my old dog,
soft, yielding and unquestioning.
May peace sift through your body
like a whisper, riding on
the white fur
of a dog's love.
May you receive the adoration
you need, the saintly love of
canines,
unceasing: forward, backward and right now,
ready to guide you through the
Mystery
and all the joy and grief dogs already understand
in every snuffle in their body.
J. Pratt-Walter, 2/16/2024
FIRST POEM
this is how
love makes invisible marks
on the vivid heart
beyond the heart,
how our hallelujah blood
hallows, --o joy—everything!
two of us evolving to a single
legs-arms-necks-lips knotwork
passion of starved skin,
these hands
an untimid touch
these breasts was pink ever so pink?
i am drawn and colored
everywhere by your love-
artistry
eyes become sighs and
breathe yes,
our story still plays inside me
nothing but you, eyes like
springtime
even your homely feet wear
my love stamped into their
soles
from the ancestors to me to you,
glorious day of days! is any day!
holding dearly you
inside it
j. pratt-walter, 2/13/2024
make
the heart
everything
passion
pink-colored
artistry
sighs
yes
nothing
but you
love
glorious
dearly
you
j. pratt-walter 2/14/24
This is the sacrament of being together
in our shared time. This is it. This is real.
Nothing extraneous, no barriers.
Nothing craved and nothing
missing.
Just water, sky and land
and how the world lifts birds
to flight. Just soil and rain reviving
a parched earthworm and tending
all the dropped seeds, all the daylight
words
I hold for you right here in my workaday hands,
no worries or blame to intrude,
only the remarkable grace of two
beings leaning
into each other like this. We smile and take
a slow breath, knowing that we
recognize
a sacrament when we’re in it.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2024
how? in the glitter-snow and
iron-ice no warmly
but world-tilt
sun-milk
below arrowhead
stars,
a small simmer
.
how? earthworm snout
starts her plow,
tilling the yarn
of earth with her gut.
sky drip behind the
untils,
until a code robin sings and
.
now o patient seed labor open
. . .thy husk
now in the hunger of animals
eggs unroll into flower
buds
fallingly into almost near-
. . .spring
j. pratt-walter, © 2024
In the red and white church of
my bones I carry the matrix of
small ministries:
I sing to all kinds of babies,
curving my air into the
tiny spoons of their ears;
I pick up so carefully
each eyeless jewel of an
earthworm caught on cement
and return it to the sentient
soil;
I speak greenly like daylight to
plants; I always try to comfort a
hurting animal, even
invertebrates.
And I look back with staggering love
at the silent lost child I was
and tell her she is so precious.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2024
Can you see that my entire body
is an altar? My eyes are lit candles,
my lungs breathe out hope’s
incense.
My heart is a shaman’s drum
pulsing
out life’s daily rhythm, tempered
with a searing chalice of honesty
lettered in my blood.
It is New Year’s Eve, yet the
graceful snake
of each minute, every butterfly
second
circles on time’s perpetual altar
cloth
as each pregnant moment births
its own
new year and another chance to do
what is right and true in what will
become
the Auld Lang Syne of your times.
So what gifts will you set on
your cloth?
Will your hands and feet be an
offering
and landmark of accountability
and compassion?
In the tilting lever of our days,
be an altar.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 12/31/2023
How can I hold fear,
how can sadness dim the day
when I step into the beauty of this
gleaming new dawn?
The fulcrum of the Earth tilts
toward goodness and I will
ride along, drinking deep the hours,
worshipping as if this were my
last chance.
J. Pratt-Walter, © 2023
