Glad! ...and Happy Thanksgiving, Canada

I’m glad we live where children laugh up to the big blue sky

Where love is served in supper soup and autumn pumpkin pie

I’m thankful to forefathers who through faith in God endured

With blood-sweat-tears for future years this land their grit secured

I’m glad for moms and dads who did not quit when love was hard

For freedom to stroll down the street or sit in the back yard

For luxury of ‘what’s for lunch?’, ‘what shall we do today?’

For ramble-amble gambols beneath sky-heath blue and gray

I’m glad for harvest, home, for poems, picnics, company

A table spread for dinner or a quiet cup of tea

For noise of carefree boys, for girly-girls, for work well done

For family to scold and hold and miss when they are gone

I’m glad we live where worship to God is not outlawed (yet)

(Though He is greater than the hate that ignorance begets

And he is faithful to the humble, never border bound

Where prayer can move a mountain to the sea without a sound)

I’m glad for gardens, summer sealed in jars for winter’s lunch

For puddles, cuddles, kite-string muddles where autumn leaves crunch

For teddy bears and messy high-chairs holding morrow’s man

For days gone by to look back on and future full of plan

I’m glad, so glad for you, my love, and glad, so glad for me

Even though we have never met we are all family

I’m glad for Words to gird our hope in a God who is real

His mercy, new each morning buoys the believer’s zeal 

Wherever we may be from where we were, I’m glad for this

Today is always clean, without intention run amiss

I’m glad for zinnias, zephyrs, zeros on a credit-line

Tables for two, when rain forecast is wrong and its sunshine

Oh my, when we begin to count the ‘glads’ of day to day

It behooves us, before all else to bow our heads and pray

Our gratitude to He who helps, loves, keeps our whole life through

I’m glad that we can know where we go He goes too, aren’t you?

© Janet Martin