From Age to Age...Sonnets on Poetry

I found a Treasure last week at a local thrift-store. The cashier raised her eye-brows, repeating the price and I told her it's fine because the money is going to help someone who really needs it and I get a gorgeous old book of poetry! 

The poetry in this volume is breath-taking and as relevant today as it was Then because matters of the human heart never really change.

 

 

This is the first poem in the book! (click to enlarge for easier reading)

  

 

Oh, language of labored intricacies,

Oh, dialect of Divine intertwined

With stuttering of thought that we appease

In verse transported from the heart and mind

Then pressed upon a page, from age to age

Preserved for those still centuries afar

From he or she who freed a lyric caged

And trembling on the stage of human heart

Where Time cannot annul those matters there

The laws of love and longing's cry immune

To liberal progression; thus some dare

To curb with ink the spirit’s unchained tune

Which weeps within, unchanged since Time began

To test and vex the foolish ways of man

***

Praise God with every breath, dear fellow-friend

For poetry is more than patent word

Or edifices of syllable penned

Come, bow and let the human heart be stirred

Where poetry pours from dawn’s far-flung doors

Or, as dusk bars its shutters once again

It splays its poesy on fallow-floors

And spills its trill to every hill like rain

That falls upon the just and unjust too

For God does not withhold His glory, no

His poetry is free for all to view

And be awed speechless by its comely show

To minor poets; He bestows the ink

Whereby the pen is filled and poets drink

***

Four seasons worth; this is earth’s carapace

Where birth and death’s half-breath proximity

Stuns mankind’s thought. We reach. Who can embrace

This Slipping through our fingers to Past's sea 

Save in a valiant verse as poets drain

From eventide and countryside and hearts

Attempts to tenderly snare and contain

In poetry the ken that God imparts

To soothe and smooth the defects of this place

Prone to impress us with Futility

If we are ignorant of Kinder Grace

Lacing existence with His poetry

Where meeker instruments of ink and page

Seek to preserve Glimpses, from age to age

© Janet Martin