john david walt

The Farmer’s Speech

He ran the cosmos

of a thousand acres

from a pick up truck,

 

mucking through mire

thicker than hell,

subduing snakes with our shovels.

 

106 degrees

smell of Kool menthol smoke

lacing the slow drenching rain of sweat

 

and that farm truck,

now a million miles away,

only oasis in sight

 

with its freon mirage

and overheating motor

beckoned me,

 

come sit in my cab.

Drink the water

of my false refuge.

 

That’s when the speech would come,

as though from the mouth of Adam himself,

that very first farmer to know the toil of dust

 

“Son, you can’t pick your jobs.

This has to be done.”

Speaking sternly into the cacophony of my complaints,

 

“John David, I don’t mind hard work.

I never have.” and those words

wore me like a cross

 

“Dammit! My soul would say.

Like a curse that is the cure

running like chemo in my veins.

 

That speech heals me

And The balmy fellowship

Of the farmer’s suffering

What I wouldn’t give to hear it again.

 

John David Walt

Ash Wednesday 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s in a nickname?

It happens somewhere between

that ninth and tenth month;

hardly takes a year

if its gonna happen at all.

A rite of belonging past the

informalities of friendship

into the kind of intimacy between

a kid and the walking stick he’s whittling on;

still plenty of coarseness to go around,

but there’s that smooth place, the handle,

exposed like velveteen,

stripped back to the place where the stick

first became wood.

That’s when it happens.

You get named beyond bloodline

deeper than water baptism

into the rarified realm of being owned yet not possessed

named in a way initiating you

into a lineage of Spirit

where deep touches deep

in the shallows of a word.

I think that’s what Sam

was getting at when he asked me,

“Is Jesus God’s nickname?”

jd walt. christmas 2011

Last Load

The end of the last harvest

Finally pours out of the truck

Tipped up toward the Heavens

Funneling joy

commingled with

Soybeans

I fight back tears of sadness

As the seed disappears into the ground

unplanted

Table(ing)

Emptying self

brims full new capacity

outpouring Love’s

invisible wine

Opening  hands

immeasurable giving

life breaking bread

that friendship may dine

Fresh Bread, New Wine

sketching the future

unleashing The Memory

unveiling The Wedding

Eternity in Time.

Krispy Kreme

Waiting in an empty parking lot

for the dough-nut shop to open,

I anticipate the sweet satisfaction of sugared bread,

craving the bitter black water’s acidic bite,

watching old men arrive with habitual precision.

I sit alone

in the car’s pre-dawn silence

peeling away night’s crusty blindness

to see a violet horizon give birth to the violent flame.

This is what writing a poem is like.

The Boys Room

We loved rifling through those drawers

in the dresser between the twin beds,

each with their night lamps

borrowed from another era

the whole room preserved

like a Smithsonian exhibit.

Only the signs said, “Touch everything.”

One hundred photos

covered the walls

narrating the vintage story of those brothers,

our Fathers, at every stage.

Their treasures our discoveries;

their journey framed us.

In those pictures

we discovered our lives,

in their youth

and in dresser drawers

filled with pocket knives, shot gun shells, army stripes

and money clips

stuffed with million dollar memories.

john david walt, jr.

Relinquishment; or “the boat”

I see me in that boat

Tired, scared, weary on the insides

Frustrated with having gotten myself into this place

Where there seems to be no way out

It is a moment of resignation that seeks for relinquishment

A soul gasping of sorts

I know how the story ends

But the anxiety of not knowing how it gets from this

Messy unresolved and unresolvable place makes me too tired

To go forward any more. 

Every day brings more nails.

Every day brings more omissions and deficits of gratitude or care or even recognition

I imagine escaping into some easy place of relief

It’s a mirage and almost feels like a betrayal of the call to relinquish

For this notion of relinquishment

Doesn’t mean actually going anywhere or doing anything. 

It is a letting go, a renunciation according to the dictionary. 

Perhaps the boat metaphor is best because there is nowhere to run

Relinquishment precludes running away—its more like dying.

john david walt

The sweet taste of Jubilee

A Poem in celebration of my Poet-Sensai, David Harrity.

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

       to proclaim freedom for the captives

       and release from darkness for the prisoners,

 to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor. Isaiah 61

My friend, a poet of Hebraic proportions

Found out he was a Jew, a new Jew

Today,

A serendipity of biblical magnitude

Now he knows why he’s wailed

At the wall of lament for so long

Smelling those tiny crumpled

Up prayers stuffed in the mortar like cigarette butts.

Now he understands why he hears

The howls of holocaust

On otherwise peaceful nights

Phantom coyotes of doom.

Now he gets it.

That’s why he’s read Scripture with such dissatisfaction

Like its in a language long since divorced from her tongue

Explains what happened

at the traveling Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit in the Rupp Arena sports complex

They caught him curled up in the corner

Cradling something like a baby

Only it was an original parchment

From the scroll of Isaiah

Speaking to him of the Messiah

He dreamed of

My friend, he touched the text, stroking the script

As though it were the hem of his robe

But you will never believe what happened next.

There he sat in the corner cradling

Isaiah in the manger of his arms.

It gets better.

The surveillance cameras, high def no less, Recorded it all.

My friend tore off a piece of the scroll, yes, the Dead Sea Scroll

And yes, to the surprise of the not-watching-at-the-time security guards

He ate it, the first seven verses of the 61^st chapter,

Said it smelled like money and tasted like honey.

I watched in stunned awe

as he chewed that ancient sheep skin

preserved intact for a thousand years

surviving flood and famine, earthquakes,

genocides, eluding a thousand grave robbers

tucked away in a cave, a treasure hidden for posterity

Now that scroll, it’s somewhere in a sewer

Floating among feces in a flood of urine

Like a Messianic Messenger descending

From heaven to hell

Eaten, digested and crapped out by my friend,

Making its way to a non descript water treatment plant

Where it will be purified, filtered and rise up to that water tower in the sky

Where it will be on tap to refresh an entire city

And to think some catholic kid

On a school field trip finked him out.

Now my friend, the new Jew

Spends most of his time pondering the meaning

Of those words he ate that day

The sweet taste of Jubilee and

The unbelievable price I paid for him to have it.

I should tell you, this friend,

he’s my brother, my twin brother,  my identical twin brother

which makes me a new Jew too, sort of, at least a true one

I see him every Tuesday now between 1 and 3

Visiting hours at the state penitentiary

I now call home.

john david walt, jr.

Creation Account: Remixed

Light from Light called forth to shine

rending chaos deaf and blind

revealing creation’s Holy Mind

Divine

 

Crashing waves cascade the sand

stirred up by an unseen hand

saying separate and their was land

as planned

 

Life abounding everywhere

filling sea and earth with prayer

Breath of Glory inhabiting air

with care

 

Thin line called Infinity

ceases all the eye can see

hiding the crease of Eternity

from me

john david walt

Imposters

What qualifies someone

who’s studied the scrolls

as a scientist

to shape souls;

hands  undirtied by

soil of human suffering

not their own;

preferring questions

of authorship and manuscript

to cancer and porn,

only to have their classes

jailed in binders

in a thousand cellars

of the future.  

john david walt

The Farm Wakes Up

Those April mornings

half the time

couldn’t decide whether

to roll out of the covers

or hit the snooze bar

like March did so many times.

 

Same with farm hands,

early on the shop yard

layered like  winter beds

long johns, shirts, jackets, cover-alls

stoking the furnace of oil cans, cardboard

and scrap lumber, burning its slow way

through the steel of a 55 gallon drum,

hands hovering above the sunrise fire.

 

Their foggy exhale of Easter’s tide

lilts upwards yet clings to Lent

breath of life disappearing into the smoke of garbage

dissipating, comingling with the black, billowy plumes

of diesel, rising to cense the sky

unmistakable melody of tractor song

squelching out the birds

singing to the fields

awakening the farm

in us all. 

 

john david walt

The Roman Road

My children built a Roman Road today

in a cake pan.

Pride beaming,

Mary K., junior-mom, rehearsed the recipe:

3 thick strips of freshly degrounded grass

to line the shoulders.

23 shiny white glittering rocks

(no doubt snuck from some neighbor’s flower bed)

to pave the surface

just below came 6 cups of pea pebbles;

under that spread 23 square inches of gravel

(of the non-descript grey variety)

then 5 to 8 more cups of pea pebbles.

all of this overtop a thick foundation,

10 cups (or 9 depending on the consistency)

 of transplanted sandbox, still wet from winter.

Then smash it down, impressing the layered cake

into the clay mold of the earth (or pan as the case may be).

 

That sheetcake in his hands

shimmering brilliance, whispering war. 

The ancient recipe 

unmarking boundaries of Caesar’s chariot

and the narrow route of David’s dream.

 

Lifiting a glitteriing rock from the road,

to my ear like a seashell

I listened.

The stone, now speaking, crying out, 

“Must civilized paths run Suffering’s way

mapquesting armies of progress and power

marching up the hill of passion

like thieves 

only to flank  the One

who alone can drink their cup?

Calling himself “The Way?” 

 

As David holds the cake pan

bursting with kingly ambition,

“Dad! Can we build one of these as a path

through our garden?”

john david walt

Did you hear it?

I’d never heard it before

today on the 15th row

of the Main Street church.

As we gathered at the river, so to speak,

waters of baptism

thickening blood of birth.

Then a voice cried out

noone seemed to hear;

he or she I could not tell

so loud- piercing, penetrating.

In the resonance of that tone

lived every voice that ever loved;

a pleasing, deafening, unending crying out,

like in a gladiatorial arena

so loud you can’t hear anyone

only everyone

as a single voice.

 

Then I saw it

the spectacle;

two small forms,

boy and girl, hand in hand

walked to the altar

peered through it  like a window

and climbed straight through.

Gone! into the pregnant air!

just like that!

 

And then a glimpse

the arena of the sky

teaming with people

going ape

Polycarp and Perpetua 

slapping high fives

about to fall out of their 

tricked out luxury sky-box

 

and I wondered… . 

why didn’t I shout?

 

jd walt

(on the occasion of the baptism of Morgan and Athan)

Turn this bread into stones

Those dumb books

aisle after aisle

shelf atop shelf

volume on volume on volume

of silence.

Dumb books

holding a million words

and can’t make a sound.

Penned to parchment and page

imprisoned, their bindings silently shout,

“Crucify them!”

 

Once written a word dies

loses its tone and nerve

 

So open wide and eat all you can

drink from the well of remembrance

and live.  

Listen.

John David Walt