Pleasure

The poetic form *The Pleiades 

*seven six-syllable lines beginning with the letter of the title-word

Perhaps she will fail you

Please, don't misunderstand

Poetry perplexes

Poets with pen in hand

Pacing half-paragraphs

Probing thought-oceans stirred

Painting pictures with word

 Janet Martin

Speaking Out for Truth

 Matt turns 16 on Friday...what is a mother to do?

Dear child, I’d like to tell you

That this world is full of lies

And you must ever be on guard

For wolves in sheep-disguise

It seems that you are growing

Up too fast for my own good

So I would like to set things straight

Like every parent would

Dear child, this life; it isn’t fair

Not everybody wins

And just because we may not care

Does not absolve our sins

Judgment day is coming

God is gracious, life is cruel

Be kind to your neighbor and

Don’t scoff at rules or school

Texting and driving kills

Drinking and driving too

As do ten thousand thrills and ills

Not yet revealed to you

Don’t talk with your mouth full

Brush and floss, ah, you may laugh

But someday if you’re lucky

Folk may want your autograph

…and you don’t want to meet them

With your teeth still full of lunch

Remember; love is more important

Than a six-pack when you crunch

And looking out for others

…gentle words and ready smile

Unlike fabricated fashion

Never will go out of style

Treat a lady like you hope

Someone treated your mother

Don’t be loose with things like kisses

Respect one another

Dare to stand alone

If it means doing what is right

For though you may be scorned

You will be precious in God’s sight

Read the Bible, it’s the only

Infallible truth

Life is short though now you think

You own the fount of youth

Be kind always, always

Someday you may be husband or wife

And habits molded early

Often follow us through life

Pray in the morning, pray at noon

And pray again at night

For it is easy to get lost

If we yield faith to sight

…and God is ever-faithful

Rich or poor can trust His Word

He wrote the most amazing

Love story that man has heard

Live, laugh, love with courage

Be your best self you can be

Don’t forget that Jesus loves you

From now through eternity

…Dear child, I’d like to tell you

To be ever on your guard

For wolves dressed in sheep-clothing

Wrong is easy; right is hard

And it is wise to study keenly

What are lies and what is Truth

There’s a world full of opinion

Waiting to influence Youth

© Janet Martin

I've written the verse below in numerous cards, as my mother did to me because it is hard to ' lean not on our own understanding ' and to 'trust Him with all our heart' no matter our age.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart
    and lean not on your own understanding; 
 in all your ways submit to him,
    and he will make your paths straight. Prov. 3:5-6

On April...

April, though famous for its fool

Unravels silver from its spool

Then every indent is a pool

And every pool a mirror

She spills and fills enchanted nook

With laughter from her unchained brook

And we forget how long it took

To quash her predecessor

April, flighty, double-minded

Matron armed with broom and bonnet

Sun-rain-snow, a vexing sonnet

Testing farmer-courage

She arranges bud on bower

Probes the pod that births the flower

Breaks earth’s bondage with her shower

Wakens winter storage

April, metaphor for Life

Gray and gold, laughter and strife

Where each gritty glance is rife

With hope’s ever-keen yearning

April, Time's bridge twixt white and green

Summer’s rebel, winter’s queen

Wisdom’s wait-wizened in-between

Lent for our humble learning

© Janet Martin

 I dare say  no one here is mourning her passing

and yet, April is rife with blessing...


April at a glance...

This poem was inspired as I read an oldie by Robert Frost which reminded me that April has always been like a double-minded man, unstable in all her ways ;)

Two Tramps in Mud Time or A Full-time Interest

By Robert Frost  (my book dates it 1936 and here it says 1934)

 Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”
I knew pretty well why he dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of beech it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good
That day, giving a loose to my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And fronts the wind to unruffle a plume
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake: and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn’t blue,
But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheel rut’s now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

The time when most I loved my task
These two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You’d think I never had felt before
The weight of an axhead poised aloft,
The grip on earth of outspread feet.
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

Out of the woods two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps.)
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax,
They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man’s work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right — agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.

Reading Between the Lines...

Poetry; the most intimate road between writer and reader.  James Scoles

When we make love out of habit, not heart

We pander with plebeian phrases, fine art

Finger-tip routine and word void of need

Scorns silver-linings with second-rate greed

There is no poetry in worn cliches

Cold, like an ember bereft of its blaze

Darling, how busy our bodies become

Deaf to the music that musters the poem

Surely the laugh-lines of yesterday’s bliss

Longs to replenish our mouths with its kiss

Touch; be the climax of hard-fought foreplay

Second-mile murmurs through guerdons of clay

Beauty is not in the shaping of skin

But bleeds from rudiments somewhat akin

To scarlet-stained front-lines where we over-threw

Common-clad odds to protect what we knew

Darling, let’s undo the air with our eyes

…covet the apex of want for its Prize

For when we make love out of habit, not heart

We desecrate its most venerable part

© Janet Martin

  

How Much Is an Hour?

 Each Tuesday and Friday mid-afternoon begins The Question; how much longer until Matthew and Victoria come home? and often my reply is 'oh, about an hour'. Yesterday he sighed a big sigh and asked, but how much is an hour?

How much is an hour

Little lad asked of me,

Why child, don’t you know it?

An hour is free

…free for the taking and making of dreams

Free for the tasting or wasting its reams

Free for our laughter or perhaps a tear

Free to be wandered or squandered in fear

Free walk once around the clock

Free to be kissed, hugged or frittered in thought

Free to our labor and free to our play

Free to wee child or to sage, bent and gray

Free-fall of hope and opportunity

Free phantom nugget of ‘almost-memory’

Free frame to fill with whatever we do

Free Wonderful as I spend it with you

How much is an hour, dear child at my knee?

Why, the whole world over an hour is free

© Janet martin

Calling It More Than Day

PAD Challenge Day 30: today’s prompt, write a “calling it a day” poem

The outer edge of almost night etches skylines of dark on light

Its chief appointment of mere air defeats determination’s stare

And we cannot bond to our touch the hour ere time’s quiet clutch

Reclaims its gasp of gifted grace into that phantom holding place

Of history and memory and all that nevermore will be

We are its troubadours where Want’s storehouse of thought implores

To minute-hand and moment-sphere and season’s spitting year on year

This doggerel twixt life and death impresses to each granted breath

The Imminence of recompense trembling in Time’s deliverance

Of black and white and almost night before that first and final Flight

We simply call it Night and Day; this dallying on Life’s highway

Leads not to tombs or holding rooms; its smattering of broken blooms

A testament of greed and need and Mercy for which all men plead

As we tread more than moment-lore to that supreme, Ultimate Door

…how gossamer Time’s gilded string links eons to each evening

© Janet Martin

I was suddenly struck by a surge of Time; its breadth designed

in morning prayer and breakfasts where 

children leave out-grown shoes behind...

 

Farewell April 2014

Our wearied optimism reaches past this cold, gray day

Spring charms that we envisioned have been pinned on sleeves of May

For April did not flatter us with honey-golden guile

But scattered flurries where we dreamed of daffodil-drenched isle

April unleashes her farewell in phlegmatic downpour

We do not mourn her passing as we haste her through the door   

For our misconception of a bonny green-eyed lass

Has waned; and now to merry May we lift hope’s polished glass

Dear April, please do not consider us vulgar or rude

We do not want to shoulder long this morose attitude

But oh, the farmer hungers for the thrill of furrow-dust

How long must we be patient, pleading for anointed trust?

The gardener is waiting with perfection planted dream

The poet pines for music of dusk’s amethyst requiem

The lad inside the window wonders when the rain will end

While mother murmurs prayers and platitudes to be patient

Farewell then, fretting shower where the flower waits to bloom

May waits to strum the hour with froth-cloth of petal plume

We wait to till earth’s thoroughfare and plant its field once more

But first we kindly usher April out through Time’s back door

© Janet Martin

After the storms in the central/southern states the past few days (thoughts and prayers are with you) it seems trite to even almost grumble or be negative but this April/ winter and spring so far has broken numerous records NOT on the sunny, warm side. We had one or two truly warm, pleasant days in April; not enough to dry fields and allow farmers to plant at all! Still, God is in control and we do not want to question His order…

Come, Come where Blossoms Bloom

Come, see where blossoms bloom

 (click link to see gorgeous blossom)

Come, see where blossoms bloom

Before the sweet of fruit

And leaf returns to root

Hope spills its half-bud plume

Come, stroll where dreaming roof

Is fraught with fragrant flow’r

Before the bleeding bow’r

Bends low with harvest-proof

…and here we, arm in arm

‘neath virgin canopy

Of what is yet to be

Taste youth in all its charm

Come, come where blossoms bloom

Too soon the fruit will fall

Its musky madrigal

Filling thought’s holding-room

© Janet Martin

Perfectly Blue

PAD Challenge Two-for-two Tues; Write a realism poem Write a magical poem

That magical moment

Clear out of the blue

When my heart skips a beat

At the thought of you

Jolt to reality

…bittersweet bliss

The grand realization

Of what no longer is

Tick-tock proof tango

Perfectly blue

One part me

The other part

You~

© Janet Martin

Caught in the Becoming of You...

PAD Challenge two-for-two-Tues:

• Write a realism poem. A poem that is rooted in the real world. Or…
• Write a magical poem. A poem that incorporates magical or fantastical elements

No abracadabra will bring you to me

No wand can rearrange history

Nor can I fold with a wink of my eye

Miles gaping cold between you and I

No spell can force from your lips thought unheard

Laughter and love are not tricked into word

Black-scarlet cape, the illusionist’s cloak

Cannot obliterate horrors we spoke

Night is a deep velvet hat, but the years

Cannot reverse where its dark disappears

Thought-blood of sorrow is not red, but blue

Its potent river unscathed by voodoo

You are unreachable, no hex or charm

No metamorphosis manifests form

Ethereal harbor of mystic appeal

Time’s transformation from real to surreal

I’ve never touched you and yet you become

My every whisper and deed I have done

Darling, you tease me with echoes; your kiss

Ravaging eons of what no longer is

I cannot gather you nor hypnotize

That which is bent on streamlining your sighs

Yet here in my hand your threads tremble, gold-gray

Waiting to weave your corpus; Yesterday

© Janet Martin

Matrix of Memories

Poured into the mold of Moment

Supple season-serenade

Tick-tock shell; ethereal advent

Of a memory being made

Trip and tumble, wander, squander

Dredging deeps and skimming surf

Touch and treasure, moment-measure

Time's touch-down on transient turf

Wish and wonder, pray and ponder

Free-fall from a fount of air

Sip and savor, Mercy’s favor

Spills and fills in half-breath fare

Drip and dangle, silver spangle

Garnishing laughter and tears

Sanguine sorrow none can borrow

Brushing bygones into years

Poured into a mold of Moment

Sacred, soundless sparkles sift

Matrix of tender-sweet torment

Where a life of memories drift

© Janet Martin

I was out putting cages around pink peony-points peeping through the earth:)! 

Suddenly an over-whelming sense of bittersweet washed over me as I recalled tugging them out, tossing them on a pile, tasting tears of letting go as I was re-living moments of summer, wedding, life etc...

Settling Matters

 PAD Challenge day 28: write a 'settle' poem

Sun settles twixt shadows

Dew settles on grass

Thought settles on matters

That soon too shall pass

Want settles on nothing

Dust settles on sod

Where rain settles dust

Hope settles on God

Love settles on others

Lust settles on Self

Time settles in pages

On history’s shelf

Sea settles twixt shorelines

Hen settles on brood

Trust settles on something

Not yet understood

Kiss settles on lips, love

Hearts settle on chance

Alone love, we hunger

Together we dance

© Janet Martin

Beneath the Leaning Sky

PAD Challenge day 28: Write a settled poem

When morning strikes her match

Beneath the leaning sky

It seems to me we almost catch

A twinkle in God’s eye

For Goodness is not cupped

In midnight’s yearning deep

And where dusk’s settled verdicts supped

Now virgin hours leap

Beneath the leaning sky

Where morning’s yesterday

Delighted and bereaved our sighs

Grace kindly lights our way

And from God’s vaulted thought

Beyond mortal mind-grasp

He sweeps our yesterday to naught

And settles it as Past

It seems to me we catch

A glimpse of paradise

As Mercy unfetters a latch

In dungeon-darkened skies

The dust of practice runs

Has settled; on Time’s shore

Pardon bestows another dawn

Like none ever before

A twinkle in God’s eye

Hope’s hallelujah spills

From ebony to gilt reply

Across celestial rills

Benevolence delights

The air as midnight-chains

Dissolve; God settles Mercy’s sights

Where time and hope remains

© Janet Martin

Where Dark and Light Collide

PAD Challenge day 27: write a monster poem

You slink between whispers

And hide beneath pillows

Tireless fiend, you torment and impose

Ill-favored presence

Wherever the essence

Of faith-flicker falters; you flaunt grim unknowns

You mock and scorn

Where Hope, tear-stained and torn

Clutches a candle and kisses dark seas

Devious fraud

As your sickle, a god

Unto the wicked, draws faith to its knees

Skeletal carcass

Wherever the dark is

Here, in your glory you unleash your breath

Pitiless reaper

And merciless schemer

Gathering souls for a harvest of death

  

We could not chance

Morrow’s imminence

Save for One greater to comfort and cheer

In vain you lash

Seething where demons thrash

For Faith in God grounded is greater than fear

© Janet Martin

The Shortfall of Mortal Love

Love, I would give you everything I have to have and hold

And promise ‘we’ will be enough until I’m very old

The wanting for your touch I pray would never fill or wane

Nor would I suffer very much if love should cause my pain

Darling, the satisfaction of man-woman melded heart

Would be enough forever, but for Love’s intrinsic Part

And just to have you need me would be its immortal prize

Its thrill my hallelujah and its kiss my paradise

Sweetheart, when love lives long enough it is life’s greatest wealth

For it has stood the test of time in sickness and in health

And as I run my fingers over lines betraying youth

I covet years to learn and earn its covenanted truth

…yet oh, for all the beauty that love’s have and hold imparts

It cannot placate wholly the hunger of human hearts

Love, I would render everything I have, to thee entrust

But, there is no salvation in a love twixt dust to dust

© Janet Martin

Mercy's Monument

You can never leave

Though our eyes no longer touch

Where once we held the Prime of life

And Innocence and such

You may think time forgets

Because distance expands

From miles and hours into years

Of echo-stricken sands

Love holds while it lets go

Farewell is not despair

But mercy’s muted monument

Of love turned into prayer

© Janet Martin~

Living Water

PAD Challenge day 26; write a water poem

We weigh our will with wanting

And weep that we are cursed

With intransigent taunting

Of begging, bleeding thirst

We stuff our cheeks and plunder

 Earth's bread-crumb luxuries

While groaning as we wonder

What will this thirst appease?

Our pockets bulge with bondage

The well of transient bliss

Lures us, like eager children

To drink its emptiness

We clamor for sweet nectar

To quaff our guilt and greed

Is there nothing but water

To fill this mouth of need?

Will we, for all existence

Be damned to drink in vain?

The hollow of resistance

Our perpetual pain?

Hark; hope pours from Love’s fountain

Spoken to sinners first

Pure, precious words of Promise

To satisfy our thirst

‘I give you Living Water,

A Well-spring from within

And everyone who drinks from it

Will never thirst again’

© Janet Martin

Brewed Bliss

 PAD Challenge day 26: write a water poem

Water is wonderful

just as it is

But brew it through Brazilian beans

and you get

Bliss

© Janet Martin

Small and Mighty...

 PAD Challenge day 26: write a water poem

You didn’t say a word

As I spilled wrath’s disgrace

But the rebuke that roused my shame

Was written on your face

My foolhardy revolt

For all its brash veneer

Was silenced by the reprimand

Of one wee, bitty tear

© Janet Martin

All That We Have Is Today

Time is a treasure we cannot steal or borrow

And we do not know what will happen tomorrow

Ever the fortune that no one can tell

All that we have is Today; spend it well

Time is the patriarch of bygone years

No one can cage it; it just disappears

Ethereal Presence without form or face

Yet ever and always Today; gift of grace

Mute moment-merchant; no barterer he

Tick-tock allotment of favor; full, free

To beggar and baron alike will befall

Time’s equal portion, Today; that is all

Time is a breath-by-breath measure of grace

Who can foretell it or its steps retrace?

Century-boast yet its breadth none can say

All that we have of its thread is Today

© Janet Martin

Ah, Word...

Ah word, what worlds you wield

What wonder you impart

You spill your ink-fraught yield

From fathoms of the heart

Ah, word, we trace your trove

To hear the soundless sound

Of breakers crashing on a cove

Of shoes on holy ground

…of gondolas at dusk,

Or city-streets at noon

A word can spell the colors of

The azure eyes of June

Ah, word, you whisper where

The eye a thought descries

We read, deciphering with care

What word is Truth or lies

Ah, Word, we touch Thy page

Where God’s voice changeless, sure

Proves faultless still from age to age

Its promises secure

© Janet Martin

So much to read, so many opinions, much inspiration, beauty, ugliness…

Here, in God’s Word there is no deciphering between truth and lies.

Of Burden and Beacon

Here upon time’s season-fallow

We are called, not to employ

Moments for a moment’s measure

But for love’s eternal joy

Here upon thorn-thistle canvas

Ripe with dread and black with doom

We go forth; and pray Lord willing

Here and there a little bloom

Sorrow spills its solemn season

Laughter thrills our lips, ere strife

Bleeds its burden, still Love’s beacon

Breaks the dark of death with Life

Hope and heartache intermingle

This will ever be our fight

As the Love of God eternal

Lights our candle with His Light

Here upon Time’s season-vapor

We are called, not to despair

But to trust and praise our Maker

As we light hope’s wick with Prayer

© Janet Martin