June's Joy...

 It's the final Saturday of this most darling of months; June

June’s pink peony pom-poms melt in russet afterglow...

June’s strawberry and cream delights, delight...

...then disappear 😋

And leave satisfied appetites grinning from ear to ear...

June’s pink peony pom-poms melt in russet afterglow

The meadow is a showcase of green-sheen and daisy-snow

The deluxe maple-parasol unfurls cool pools of shade

Enticing us to linger in its umbrous serenade

June’s hints of harvest ripple ‘neath an invisible bow

If we have eyes to see we are seated in the front row

For prime shows from a Maestro conducting a symphony

Where fields are full of music and gardens with poetry

June’s first-rate backyard getaways leave little to desire

The rise and fall of laughter and chatter round a camp-fire

The sweet mini-vacation beneath luscious, leafy limbs

The fading out of feathered flutes as drawn-out twilight dims

June bends the breeze with banter we all feel a small part of

It tips yon blue decanter and pours out a song of love

Romancing us with roses and enchanting us with show’rs

And sweeping us off bare feet with a grand fleet of wild flow’rs

June’s yearly visit is always too short and sweet, it seems

How dearly we anticipate this darling of our dreams

How butter-smooth and utter, the undoing of Her days

While hearts are heaped with happiness and lips are steeped with praise

June’s strawberry and cream delights, delight then disappear

And leave satisfied appetites grinning from ear to ear

While jolly shocks of hollyhocks are reaching for the sky

Arranged where June estranged gives way to heartthrobs of July

© Janet Martin

June Is Like a Poem

 

Some sweet June-stanzas already savoured today...💗💗😊

June is like a poem waiting to be reined

Earth a-throb with lyrics spilling unrestrained

Woodland, field and garden sparkle, pulse and brim

Filling hills and hearts and dells with nature’s hymn

June is like a poem written without ink

Filling loose-leaf pages with gold-orange-pink

From sunup to sundown stanzas dance and drip

Land and welkin burgeon with God’s penmanship

June is like a poem, summer-warm and sweet

Spilling like a love-song to earth’s music-sheet

From daisy-decanter, through leaf-canopies

Snared in barefoot banter, sighing on the breeze

June is like a poem waiting to be read

Wonderfully woven with botanic thread

Luring us with lyrics’ gleaming, teeming sheen

From the lily-lantern and fields silver-green

June is like a poem people cannot write

Lesser poets grapple with its pure delight

Delving into inkwells, dew and raindrop pearled

June is like a poem from God to the world

© Janet Martin

From the lily-lantern

and fields silver-green...

A June Jingle

A glimpse at bits of inspiration for today's poem

As she sees in each petaled star the way time disappears...

June flutters by like a butterfly on wings of gossamer/go-summer

A dashing smile of chamomile and pink peony blur

It tinges views with silver blue of distant mist-kissed green

And tests the thrill of what yet is with will of what has been

This month of months blushes with blooms, the belle at nature’s ball

Enticing us to linger where its limber shadows fall

Where longing and surrender spar like Woman wearing years

As she sees in each petaled star the way time disappears

June sweeps through morning, noon and night as spring becomes summer

And it seems that we never quite get quite enough of her

Where she climbs trellis, fences, gates; delightful, verdant vine

Oblivious to ever-zealous appetites of Time

June slips between the sheen of green glory of woodland tress

Her laughter spills and rolls down hills in daisy-happiness

She strums the breeze with melodies we never weary of

While, for a while we all grow younger and all fall in love

June sparkles in rain-dazzled rose, and in strawberry pie

It glimmers where the cornfield grows and flows out to the sky

It dances through the garden where both plants and children thrive

And makes even the hardened grumbler glad to be alive

June is a gift-table brimming with beauty of the earth

Where we are all invited to partake of wonder’s worth

The hollyhock is cobbled with buds primed with perfect pink

Methinks June is a fountainpen suffused with flower-ink

Then let’s bury our faces in its perfect poetry

And marvel at the perfumed pages of bloom-balladry

Let’s let its lyrics tickle tips of noses, lips and chins

Before summer’s slow, subtle, certain unrav’ling begins

© Janet Martin

When The World Is Full of June

 Twilight perches upon a dew and dust kissed pedestal...

The earth runs green with majesty of not yet sun-scorched grass

The sky is like a sweep of deep blue sea where cloud-ships pass

The garden is a wonder-world unfurled in flower-flares

And draws even the atheist to worship unawares

The countryside is like an errant splash of paradise

A free-for-all buffet where we may come and feast our eyes

On regal iris, courtly lupine, ruffled peony

To revel, nature-wealthy in June’s lap of luxury

We sense friendships rekindled with graces that we expect

Like hymns of feathered minstrels from limbs sun and shadowed-decked

Like the lush, rush of rivers that we hear but no one sees

As sweet and sassy zephyrs ripple through leaf-canopies

The parks are dotted with bobbing balloons with legs and arms

Chased by larger, slower balloons sounding caution’s alarms

Where picnics become anything but dreamy; yet its mess

Still has a funny way of turning into happiness

The river-bank is flanked with fishermen and fav’rite brews

Where some come to be young again and some to sit and snooze

And some to read and some to glean a poem-gem (or five)

And some who want for nothing, just content to be alive

The fields flaunt faith’s first answers; farmers pray for no late frost

Porches boast perfect planters, not yet to neglect’s ‘oops’ lost

The lily-chalice spills its port to butterflies and bees

As moments sparkle and cavort through almost-memories

Twilight perches upon a dew and dust kissed pedestal

A masterpiece that lingers longer on earth’s westward sill

So then we linger longer too, enchanted by a tune

That never fails to thrill us when the world is full of June

© Janet Martin

If She Could (a Farewell to June)

And so begins the beauty-blur of summer in its beaming prime

And if she could she’d try to slow the hurried foot of Father Time

Where June slipped through her fingers with its flurry of petals and wings

And if she could she’d thread each day like pearls upon silver-swirled strings

As fields are folded into hay and longest days still seem too small

And if she could she’d heap a tray with keepsakes felled from nature’s hall

For always she is overcome with a parental tug of heart

And if she could she’d frame the spectrum of Echo’s elusive art

Where part of her will always stay entangled in June’s wonderment

And if she could she’d find a way to let go without fond lament

But love is always a fine mingling of bitter and sweet entwined

And if she could she would (sometimes) return to places left behind

For June never seems long enough to satisfy the poet’s yen

And if she could she would (just once) turn back and do it all again

© Janet Martin

I really would do June all over again if I could! 

This June the weather was almost perfect!

June Is...

June is a poet’s quill

An inkwell filled with flowers

From dawn to dusk its ballads spill

From beauty’s bloom-bent bowers

To render breathless awe

Where Splendor overflows

Like a buffer to Murphy’s law

Where we suffer his woes

June is a gallery

Of frameless pictures hung

Showcasing the diversity

Of One second to none

While squires of low degree

Grapple with rebel ink

To wrangle into poetry

Green-gold-blue-purple-pink

June is a lover’s quarrel

Between the hand and heart

Duty tethers the hand to toil

While beauty spills its art

And fills the heart with fires

Edict cannot suppress

Until verse satisfies desire’s

Unbridled happiness

June is heaven’s foothills

Thirty days deep and wide

Where azure height and green fount spills

Across the countryside

It beckons to the Bard

Who knows she cannot sleep

Until she gathers into word

A memento to keep

© Janet Martin

 I wish you could join me to 

hear the orchestra of flowers playing as

robin, chipping sparrow, gold finch and chickadee 

tweet-tweet and trill their little hearts out outside my window...

now, one more picture because...

last night when I drained the bathtub the toilet and kitchen sink started gurgling 😢

...if all goes as planned

this will be a mound of dirt by the end of the day...boo-hoo!

Stay tuned😐

 (I did plant some of the herbs in pots for a reason

and this area is always planted with the awareness

that every so many years it will be uprooted completely.)

and here is the pinnacle of all June poems

What Is So Rare As A Day in June

And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays;
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;
Every clod feels a stir of might,
An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
And, groping blindly above it for light,
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers;
The flush of life may well be seen
Thrilling back over hills and valleys;
The cowslip startles in meadows green,
The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice,
And there's never a leaf nor a blade too mean
To be some happy creature's palace;
The little bird sits at his door in the sun,
Atilt like a blossom among the leaves,
And lets his illumined being o'errun
With the deluge of summer it receives;
His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings,
And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings;
He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,
In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best?

Now is the high-tide of the year,
And whatever of life hath ebbed away
Comes flooding back with a ripply cheer,
Into every bare inlet and creek and bay;
Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it,
We are happy now because God wills it;
No matter how barren the past may have been,
'Tis enough for us now that the leaves are green;
We sit in the warm shade and feel right well
How the sap creeps up and the blossoms swell;
We may shut our eyes but we cannot help knowing
That skies are clear and grass is growing;
The breeze comes whispering in our ear,
That dandelions are blossoming near,
That maize has sprouted, that streams are flowing,
That the river is bluer than the sky,
That the robin is plastering his house hard by;
And if the breeze kept the good news back,
For our couriers we should not lack;
We could guess it all by yon heifer's lowing,
And hark! How clear bold chanticleer,
Warmed with the new wine of the year,
Tells all in his lusty crowing!

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how;
Everything is happy now,
Everything is upward striving;
'Tis as easy now for the heart to be true
As for grass to be green or skies to be blue,
'Tis for the natural way of living:
Who knows whither the clouds have fled?
In the unscarred heaven they leave not wake,
And the eyes forget the tears they have shed,
The heart forgets its sorrow and ache;
The soul partakes the season's youth,
And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe
Lie deep 'neath a silence pure and smooth,
Like burnt-out craters healed with snow. 

James Russell Lowell

Halfway Through June

How can it be we are half the way through

June’s paradise of green sheen and true blue

Home of copse cabins and willow-tree tents

Wild phlox meandering hither and thence

Halfway through heaven’s foothills flower-frilled

Rainbow of colour, splashed, sprinkled and spilled

Hold back the hour that snuffs out the bloom

Slow down the tempo that tatters the plume

Wait; bar the gate where day slips through too soon

Paving the runway to halfway through June

While the bard lassoes ink-intricacies

While pink the peony bobs in the breeze

How can it be half of June has been spent

Authoring longing’s most lovely lament

Gazing at garlands that God’s fingers stitched

Garden-enchanted and beauty-bewitched  

Lavished with lupines and ravished with rose

Spellbound by skylines where time ebbs and flows

Like a tide surging now near and now far

Heart-strings half fiddle and half steel guitar

Halfway through skies filled with daylight’s grand feast

Skimming night’s stars from blush bars in the east

Stealing our breath with its fair-weather show

Halfway through June but still halfway to go

© Janet Martin

...this guy hopped in front of me while I was on a bike ride tonight...
"I think if I stay really still she won't notice me"
is what he seemed to be thinking😊