Silk Slipper

A few Petals snared where summer, silk-slippered, tiptoes through our stare...

Blush beacon breaks through plush of slumber-land’s mist-hushed reprieve

Obscurity thins like the skin of Time revealing truth

Daylight dissolves the walls that veiled a world of make-believe

Earth sprawls beneath both tender touch and brawls of the uncouth

Courage and cowardice, rivals since Eden barred its gates

Proceed into the battlefield where no one knows what waits

A scarf of diamonds decks the place where grace and malice spar

Dread and delight finds footholds in the fathoms of the mind

Today unfolds its gray and gold to young and old; Time’s war

Wakens weapons of word and will with intent ill or kind

While all the while earth's smile, in spite of guile and gall of man

Bleeds flowers to flushed bowers bent with God’s cemented plan

Ripe raspberries, like clustered rubies stain fingers and lips

Summer’s sleek, silk-spun sea-song rushes over hill and dale

A shiny lake that breaks into a tidal-waved eclipse

While pioneers of progress salvage petals in a pail

Of little leaf, of singing brook, love’s afternoon soft-pressed

Between the pages of a book bound in the human breast

© Janet Martin