Tick-tock Tide

  Loved watching the ebb and flow of the tide when we were in the Maritimes this fall...

(this poem is of a slightly different tide inspired by a gray November day)

It claws at skin-veiled appetence and seeps out in each breath

It wars where confidence and creed collect hallmarks of death

And ushers in the harvest where the seeds of hunger fell

It startles us with colours tinting contrails of farewell

As soft and sound it severs what is bound beyond our clutch

And swings its pendulum of air through thoroughfares of touch

But siphons, in so doing life’s vaporous repertoire

Inexorable wooing, like the wind through leafless spire

The rhythm of time’s metronome composes common ground

Tick-tock, tick-tock, its airborne clock like a merry-go-round

Where we, aboard a carousel of fare-thee-well and thrill

Are bound by Simply Being to its four-season quadrille

To marvel at the intricacy of the bud, to mourn

How swift its petals strew the mud in madrigals forlorn

And how the gift of now keeps turning in the Thing we prize

To startle us with echoes from the dust of its demise

November knights the embers of autumn with stars of snow

It tugs at noble hearts with pangs begot by letting go

And kindles from the ashes of love’s potent passion spent

The comfort of home fires without youth’s heady torment

Where Age wears scars and laugh-lines like badges of honor, earned

Through wars it fought while being taught what those before it learned

While tick-tock tunes a tide of morn-noon-night while seasons roll

To vex vapor-virility with death-anointed toll

© Janet Martin