August's Lemonade Days

Haze-lazy languor envelopes late-summer’s afternoon

The air is steeped with stippled blips of August cricket-tune

The flag droops, limpid; like the dog’s tongue where the rippling heat

Chases both breeze and straggler from the sidewalk and the street

The bloom wilts and the worker wishes it was five ‘o clock

The blue wave flattens in monotonous laps against the dock

The shade, a poor man’s palace, begs for iced bev’rage and books

And a sudden vacation from Duty’s most stringent looks

The morning is a steamboat chugging out across the bay

Beneath the yellow-cello-sun that strums a mellow lay

Toward twilight, a harbor blurred by sweat-anointed brow

And winter is a dreamland on a dear and distant prow

The locust buzzes in the silver-poplar citadel

The catfish lolls beneath the bridge where Johnnie’s fish-hook fell

The garden is a desert, deserted by hoe and spade

On these, the lazy, hazy days of August lemonade

© Janet Martin

Okay, so anyone with a garden knows that August days are not lazy, but we snatch mini-vacations when we can...a glass of lemonade in the shade, a quick look into a poetry book

and such-like:)