Earth's bare beauty mesmerizes the eye,
before bulging buds break to gild her in green garb...
This place, curtailed by constant tick and tock where winds harass
The trees and shifting seas that shape shorelines of
rock and grass
And stirs earth’s ancient dust with lessons old yet new to
we
Who shed innocence in the ken of swift mortality
…how we are not long
for this place of human-race and sod
Until, without doubt we
return to its Creator; God
It trembles in The Soul and ravages our skiffs of skin
As we, breath-taken by the sheer undoing of time’s ply
Waken to mercy’s newness and the blueness of its sky
Where purpose wields its calling where the falling shadows
climb
The hills that wore ages of yore yet spill in flawless prime
War lords its ugly fear in hearts where love and longing war
We board the vessel of new day that sails from heaven’s door
And oft we stare, astonished as our gaze drinks from the
spring
Of nature’s changeless ways where change seems the only sure
thing
While we bury our dead and shed tears on the dust that soon
Will claim the very hands and feet that labor for its boon
Hunger besieges us and wonder’s spills in silent speech
Seasons go round and round like waves that wash and wash
earth’s beach
Where we are more than pulsing ellipses of fragile breath
Born for far more than every living thing that ends in death
Though flesh may fail and what we see may seem to be life’s
whole
Mere eye cannot descry the fathom of the shapeless soul
And fools of like-foolmindedness cheer blindly and applaud
The grave claims wise and fool alike; no one escapes death’s
due
Or what remains after life’s holy hope and grace is through
Where, even as we breathe, someone breaks breathing’s sacred
seals
To what we oft imagine but what death alone reveals
Progress perplexes pioneers of it with cons and prose
The sun sets pink but what its ink begets nobody knows
Though the pretext of what is next dares to wear cloth of
plan
We who have worn and borne it know how Unknown vexes man
For none are privy to the mystery of morrow’s way
But all are always, only, ever subject to Today
Thought’s culmination of creation’s wherefore and its why
Cannot ignore the imminence of Something more than eye
Can encapsulate, though with telescope we try to find
What lies beyond this scope of hope and reaches of the mind
But recognize that eons rise beyond this mortal flit
And realize that Someone Greater orders all of it
© Janet Martin
