Four Poems by Jennifer Pratt-Walter

 

All the Unmapped Stars

 

Oh, we see the stars, all right,

their brittle cold mystery

 

but if you took the gentlest

of knives and pushed open

the top of my head like clay,

 

in my body are all the warm constellations

one could dream of, a star nesting

in every fingertip, Polaris in each eye,

a Milky Way dripping down my spine.

 

Here are all my unmapped stars, the candles

of my small hopes, always there inside me, and look,

there are a few of yours too!

 

In the Bones of the Fire

 

I must stride into this fire, step in

like an exorcist and command the poison

out from the wounds of self-loathing so

bitter on my skin, my feet cooked crisp

in a skillet of burnt failures.

 

I must imagine myself into a light

I cannot yet see, read words still to be found

by these restless-songbird hands.

 

Look, I have gathered kindling and crackling

branches as bones for a fire.  Watch me

stroke this match aglow, shake that old

Phoenix bird awake out of her complacent nest.

Watch me lift with her, take my edge of sky

like a smouldering memorial left over after

the inferno of war.

 

Your Beauty 2

 

I adore how you wear loveliness

in the crinkles around your eyes

so that the beauty you see becomes

part of your face, you marvel,

you oxygen.

 

That’s how I want to love –

with my heart as expressive

as your eyes, receptive as sky

to the edges of my breath.

 

I See How Things Are in the World      

 

With my right eye I see things as they are,

the surface bumps, the contours, shade and wear.

All the presenting faces, the books and maps of things.

 

With my left eye I see what is mostly unseen,

even behind me. As I age, it sees what evades

the right eye: shadows, energy, mystery.

 

Now the skin of my entire face is evolving

into a vessel of sight that becomes more perceptive

the older I am, a new kind of eye looking at all times

and directions at once.

Is this what the third eye is? I wonder.

My left eye knows things that slip by grey and

unfocused, like the shadow-people my mom saw

all around her house and yard.

What do they want? I asked her but she didn’t know.

They caused no trouble; they were just always there.

 

Now I am seeing things like that too, questions that

are almost but not quite there, the unworded twilights

and mysterious glyphs, all the push-down talk

I never should have said and the outcomes returning for

retributions, all wearing their perishable colours of feelings.

Jennifer Pratt-Walter is an Elder and Pacific NW native who works in poetry, music, digital photography and Earth-based spirituality.  She loves exploring the small, ordinary or overlooked things.  Jennifer is a free-lance musician on the harp. She has three grown children and a husband and lives on a small farm in Vancouver.