Awe-gust...

Its wind is a fellow, mellow and footloose

Its footpath is yellow with stubble and dust

Its limb like a cello, chestnut and chartreuse

Rousing in poem-primed pens, wanderlust

Its ‘doth’ spread on cloth of Queen Ann’s lace and clover

Of Moth-wing staccato on screens after dark

Where dusk’s peach-plum curtain shrouds earth like a lover

Gathering his most-beloved to his heart

Its salver is set with salty-sweet surprises

Its poplar tress quivers on rivers moon-beamed

Where ebb and flow sea-song, red sunsets and rises

Create paradises, half-held, half-dreamed

Its Want fulfilled in guilt-free celebration

Of wandering where gardens laugh like a child

Happiness spills a sky-wide invitation

Blue touching down where sunflowers run wild   

August is like living inside a poem

Cricket-choirs lure us outside Duty’s gate

Crushed chamomile teases nostrils where roaming

Takes us from tasks that will just have to wait

This is the hand filled with Time’s grandest torment

A friendly forever that flowers and wings

After the purple and gold of the moment

Into the fabric of soft-echoed strings

This is the landscape of wildflowers tattered

Where soon summer starts to surrender her crown

August arousal all tousled and scattered

Its glory-days gone like glint of thistledown

© Janet Martin