Sweet Summer (part 1)

 Welcome, sweet summer!

Ps.19: part of verses 4 and 6

In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun...

...nothing is deprived of its warmth.

Sweet summer, with so much to love we hardly know where to begin…

Where heady scent of fresh-mown hay hangs heavy on dawn’s dewy hush/brush...

Where countless hues of green imbue the rolling view, leafy and lush...

I love the calm after a storm, thunders through twilight like a train

Leaving behind a dazzling world, adorned with jewelry of rain...

Sweet summer, with so much to love, each day feels like precious fling

As earth and its fulness thereof begins to laugh, and leap and sing

Where heady scent of fresh-mown hay hangs heavy on dawn’s dewy hush/brush

Where countless hues of green imbue the rolling view, leafy and lush

Sweet summer’s thoroughfare is frilled with flowers, wonderful and wild

The garden bears the eager, carefree, banter of a bare foot child

Tree canopies cast cooling pools of shadow play across the yard

Against the wall behind the house, handsome hollyhocks stand on guard

I love the calm after a storm, thunders through twilight like a train

Leaving behind a dazzling world, adorned with jewelry of rain

I love the caroling of songbirds welcoming the day, still dark

I love the sounds of children playing in the splash pad at the park

In sweet summer we slow our pace lest we miss beauty to behold

Where duty’s never-ending chase runs through joys that never grow old

Beneath the arbor lavished with fragrant, purple wisteria-sigh

Through puddles on the laneway, strewn like mirror-fragments, full of sky

Sweet summer, with so much to touch and taste and smell and see and do

Ah, ‘what is man?’ we cry to He who runs awe’s happy wonder through

With strawberry and cherry bliss pleasing palates of everyone

With wheat fields billowing like oceans turning gold beneath the sun

Sweet summertime, when life is like a gift we open every morn

Its misty wrapping melts like butter over gleaming fields of corn

And we are glad with simple things like picnic basket’s smorgasbord

A pleasure fit for queens and kings, that everybody can afford

Sweet summer, tugging us between task and basking in pools of shade

Content with a good book and glass of iced coffee or lemonade

Where days flit by like butterflies, where school doors close and scholars grin

Sweet summer, with so much to love we hardly know where to begin…

© Janet Martin

Sweet summertime, when life is like a gift we open every morn

Its misty wrapping melts like butter over gleaming fields of corn...

Beneath the arbor lavished with fragrant, purple wisteria-sigh...

With wheat fields billowing like oceans turning gold beneath the sun...