The Poet's Call

The poet, from inkwells of thought and time and space aspires

To touch the page with wage of words that sets the heart afire

While others, so it seems, pass by with carefree cups to drink

The poet bears the sweet torment of words waiting for ink

Day breaks, dawn is a feast upon the east; a bud, a rose

The poet cannot rush the tug of heart it must compose

While off to work and off to school and off to sundry chores

To other callings Called, they go, unhindered by ink-roars

Like waves that crash across the graves of days gone by, the air

Is heavy with the weight of that which only pen can snare

The sky is like an inkwell with no shore to quell its vaunt

The poet never can foretell what waits within its taunt

…and all day long while others sing the songs of poets-past

Unconscious of the utmost joy when it is writ at last

The poet wears the constant prick and pull of tick and tock

…how mist of moments spill and fill time’s quill with fleeting stock

The bell that tolls, low on the westward scrim of dying day

Consoles the lowly poet with a hymn words cannot pray

Yet, through the ordination of a call they did not seek

The poet cannot turn away from words too hard to speak

© Janet Martin

The Call...

Blind to the clucking chickens

 and squealing pigs,

the little girl of almost nine, breathless with wonder

sensed, almost like an ordination,

The Call.

She sits on the stairs to the hayloft

as words begin forming into poem

then she dashes, rubber-boots slup-slupping through the snow

beneath a black velvet sky strewn with diamonds,

to the house-to the house,

to write the words that rushed through her like

a fire-storm before they would blow away like ash...

She never asked 'Why?'

Sometimes, when  I sit down to write I think of countless others things I should could be doing, 

yet it seems I cannot until I have at least sought from He who instills in each of us a Call, (His Call in all its unique differences in all of us!)

 ... in me, a poem.