Are You Time or Are You Love?

Sometimes I lose all sense of you

You change yet never do

Sometimes you wear the soft-blurred cloth of mist

Sometimes clear blue

And sometimes you are summer’s tree

Embellishing the dark

With leaf-song, sometimes you are silhouettes of something

Stripped and stark

Sometimes you fill the sky with sighs

Akin to pain

And sometimes you slip by in flower-shaped good-byes

Sometimes you drain

The pen of poetry; sometimes you fill the quill;

it overflows

In madrigals of ecstasy the color

Of a rose

Sometimes I reach but cannot touch

The Thing I’m living for

While you brush back my hair and dare

My heartbeat to explore

The curve and verve and trace of you

Sometimes I cannot tell

Who are you? Time,

Or are you love

Or simply its farewell?

© Janet Martin