*Food For a Rambling Fancy (phrase from the book Mansfield Park)

Earth splays before man’s won’dring gaze

A plethora of nature-praise

It makes us mind our common ways

Of dirt and hurt and dust

From veiled beginnings leaps a spread

Of leafy minstrels overhead

Of flower filigree soft-bled

Beneath feet-wanderlust

It tunes the heart to rush, in sync

With art of amethyst and pink

It causes us to pause and think

On He who cups its froth

And ordains bud with buxom bloom

Draws from the mud a flaxen loom

That spills to nature’s living room

Earth’s lushest, plushest cloth

…where hope and hunger, subtly wed

 Grapples with green-gold-gray-blue-red

Time’s thoroughfare of joy and dread

An elemental must

…that moves man’s wond’ring gaze to sing

In spite of want and suffering

The author of winter and spring

Is teaching us to trust

© Janet Martin 

I am a country-dweller

Child of her wide-open fell

Raised on wind-song in the willow

Nurtured by garden and dell

Home is a country-side cottage

Hedged by her laughter of trees

Lavished with dusk-violet vesper

Kissed by a lilac breeze

Time is a four-season fellow

Barren to blossom to green

Ere scarlet-bronze-russet-yellow

Starts it all over again

I am a country-dweller

Meadow-lands rush to the sky

Foreign to soaring sky-scrapers

Save for the shadows that lie…

…blue on the burnished fallow

Before darkness lowers its vest

Over the swoop of barn-swallow

Feeding the young in her nest

I am a country-dweller

Dawn is a door to its berth

Where nature’s orchestra trembles

Strumming the harp-chords of earth

© Janet Martin   

The above poem was written four years ago...but I hunted for it after reading those lines

in Mansfield Park last night, finding in Fanny Price a kindly kindred spirit:)