February 2012
1 post
1 tag
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...
December 2011
1 post
2 tags
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...
July 2011
21 posts
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
...
Still Born Spring
Still-born spring
Cold callowing bloom
Crisping tender blades
Tepid flower’s doom
Rebuking hope
With death
Or
Winter’s last wound
Stealing the gold
But not the green
Still born spring.
jd walt
7th Grade
The old man taught us to
train the vines,
“else they’d run wild,
and bring chaos,” which
would come soon enough
he warned.
So we trained,
carefully lifting each tender shoot from
the already grassing furrow,
re-placing it on the row
lined out to weave with its kind;
out of weeds entangling grasp.
Then we tilled, turning over
entrenched middles, tearing
clod from root, roiling
...
Kindergarten
Kindergarten
closes the Summer of summers
ending the era of
2,219 salad days.
“Summer is over and gone,
over and gone,” sang the crickets.
Now opens a gentle door
to conformity’s system
begins with crayons and glue sticks,
#2 pencils and piggish pink erasers;
passes through lunch boxes and lockers,
ends with computers and credentials.
This kinder kind of interlude
so-called childrens’...
Because our Vegetables come from Prisons
So different they look here
bright colors
row upon row
glistening with synthetic dew
probably travelled a thousand miles
to get here.
Like the child slaves who plucked
them from the greedy farm,
they no longer resemble anything akin
to the soil of their origins.
I shuffle through bananas, lettuce, apples,
and from somewhere among these bins
I hear the faint cries of...
The Blue
Sitting in silence
in company of friends
I heard a Voice say,
“You must write more poems,”
straight out of the blue it came.
So I ask myself,
“What is ‘the blue’ anyway?”
The sky?
Teaming with birds,
Creation’s genius
crafting wings from handfuls of feathers
cohering by a spoken Word or two
like, “Fly You!”
Only took us 64 million years
to get up there.
The Blue…
is it what Lily,
my...
Me Watching Over Angels
When there’s nothing to poem about
I go back to my childhood room
and its universe.
Farah smiles at me,
showing me a longing undeveloped.
She speaks, saying,
“I don’t like seeing you
seeing me like this.”
I speak to her,
“What have you done to me, to us?”
And I realize you have not done it;
only played the part scripted
by every man ever lived
save one.
The stiff nipple of your...
1 tag
The Subsoiler
I remember a day
between seasons;
winter’s resting and spring’s testing
frost-caked field, fallowness
meeting the dawn of a new day
nearer the Sun.
Dad hooked the tractor
to an implement unused;
unseen by the eyes
of my youth.
The long thick ground grabbing tines
curled like claws of steel
rusted by agrarian inertia on the
equipment lot, waiting
on the farmer’s...
Morning Route
He climbs in the cab
eyes of sleep
prired open by coffee hand
diesel gurgles to a rattle hum
Hone to the east
morning star coordinates
and drive
dawn breaks
deepest thought of the trucker,
“Am I moving or being moved?
Does the sun rise or
do I descend?
jd walt
2 tags
Morning Worship
He stood in the barnyard
like a commander over creation
wresting the hardened past-ripe kernals
from the field corn
falling to the ground like rain
as the ducks congregated
for morning worship.
Blue jeans, T-shirt
ground broken boots
and a 1983 red & white Buick Truckers hat
adorning adolescence
like a Fransican habit
cloaking the ordinary blaze of holiness
birthing again the...
June 2011
6 posts
Runway
“Made like him, like him we rise, Ours the cross, the grave, the skies.” -Charles Wesley
Those moments
after absurd announcements
about seat cushions
doubling as flotation devices,
inching across the tarmac waiting for flight,
give way to a condition of spirit
suspended between rest and sleep
Sitting buckled into a facade of security
escaping into the velocity of Peace.
And knowing ...
Speed
Hurtling down the free-way
enslaved by speed
the rocket van
with the stuck accelerator
drinking gas like crack,
addicted to speed.
When did he awaken
to that tyrannical controller
of their cruise,
wicked autopilot of death,
speed?
Was it job #3 or move #4
that transition the teenager never made,
sucked into a sophistication stunting maturity
soiling morality, exiling her to a rehab-life
all...
1 tag
Commencement Speeches
Who listens
to these wise words,
pouring fonts of eloquence
learned advice
funny stories
year after year
speech upon speech
listening, laughing
not hearing;
like eating potato chips.
After all, who can remember one?
So this simple counsel
to graduates everywhere:
Should this podium
ever come to you,
don’t say much.
Defrock self.
Discard the robe of honor.
Cast off the ridiculous...
Wonder Bread
Bread Machines
all the rage when we married,
given one, we baked.
Newlyweds pouring the ancient art of Bread
into a machine
No kneading mess on the countertop,
no human-handed rolling pin
flattening the lump into a plain,
no rising, no waiting,
That bread machine
with its lists of steps and instructions
sequences and rules;
made bake by number bread,
stripping, no robbing the yeast
of its magical...
What is the gift of prophecy?
Prophecy
like a womb that hovers over every spoken person pregnant with words waiting not to be spoken into existence but revealed released spoken from the Future unleashed into Arabic or English catalyzing the instant where uranium goes nuclear
or maybe prophecy is like the cloud and fiery pillar of presence longing for some person to hear the silent language of “in heaven,” ...
Beginning
“Not all art is creativity, but all creativity is art.” j.d. walt