Friday, April 6, 2018

*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:)



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