So Long, September

This is always a sentimental day of the year...So long, September!

Swept away in a flurry of preparation and preserving!

September- the thick of

Earth's heaven 

of harvest!

So long, September’s misty morn...

Like a postlude, to tune the dark

With ballads slipping like a tear

No lips can kiss away...

Tonight's dessert awaiting a mound of freshly-whipped cream,

before heading to Jim's mom and sister, who are cooking the rest of supper!

So long, sweet sweep of summer spent

Of green-leaf secrets whispered ere

The air grew heavy with the scent

Of farewell’s pungent atmosphere

Ere daylight’s dusky hours fell

Faster beneath gavels deep blue

Where younger hunger tolled a bell

Of inevitable adieu

So long, September’s misty morn

Futile to stoke Past’s embers, oh

Or don a countenance forlorn

Where seasons always come and go

A time to plant, a time to reap

A time to greet, a time to part

A time to laugh, a time to weep

And gather harvests for the heart

…fragments of color, peach and plum

Of hummingbird and butterfly

A petal-and-echo-spectrum

From summer full of days gone by

Of dahlia-pom-poms, vermillion

Of fields trembling with cricket lays

Of harvest moon medallion

Dangling above our raptured gaze

Where compositions of so-long

Rouse rhapsodies no pen can spell

Like the teal essence of sea-song

Rolling within, swell after swell

Like a postlude, to tune the dark

With ballads slipping like a tear

No lips can kiss away. Ah, hark!

Is that a falling leaf I hear?

So long, well-trampled garden path

By expeditions to and fro

To heap baskets with aftermath

That always awes and thrills us so

With toil and mercy’s dividends

Praise God from whom all blessing flows

For every break of day that wends

To so-long’s certain curtain-close

So long, purple wild aster art

And amber ambience that gleams

Like fresh-pressed cider, sweet and tart

To tease eager taste-buds with dreams

That, in spite of what time may take

It kindly, generously grants

Un-stoppered wonderment to wake

A time to sing, a time to dance

So long, so long, September-love

Of fading flower-serenade

Of clinging to a thinning glove

We wear on earth, but heaven-made

Of places we never quite found

And some we did, and never sought

So long, so long, September, crowned

With apple-red and golden rod

© Janet Martin

Intangible Tango

You press half-pictures to a place

Where fact and fancy interlace

Like woodland shadows as they spill

In dusky fringes, dark and still

To mellow, painted meadows where

You press your hello to the air

And draw me almost close enough

To feel the essence of your love

Slip through seasons without a name

Like poetry no pen can tame

As lost and lonely as the flight

Of a kiss blown into the night

Or fragments of a melody

Wild as a riled, wave-ragged sea

You press half-pictures to a place 

No touch can ever quite retrace

© Janet Martin

The Lane Is Quiet Now...

Seeing all the precious first-day-of-school photos

tugs at the strings of mom-hearts at the other end of school-days spectrum

Pinch Me!! Where did that seemingly-endless season slip?!

The lane is quiet now...

The lane is quiet now

No mother’s prayers flung aft

Her precious troop of scholars

No frantic antics, wept-laughed

The lane is quiet now

Save echoes, bittersweet

No toast and jam dashed after one

Who had no time to eat

No new-shoes-backpack joy

Or belly-butterflies

Or darling little girl and boy

Tugging at mom’s heart-ties

No watching that old clock

Dwindle the minutes till

‘Hurry, hurry!! You’ll miss the bus!’

Repeats its frenzied drill

That once-upon-a-time

Forever-long somehow

Unraveled into mist-kissed clime

The lane is quiet now

© Janet Martin

That once-upon-a-time

Forever-long somehow

Unraveled into mist-kissed clime

The lane is quiet now...

(the last first-day-of-school exactly 6 years ago now!)

The lane is quiet now

save cricket tweet-tweet-tweet...

Dear September, (A Summer-lover's Entreaty)

Yesterday disappeared before I had a chance to

poem-welcome September💖

These days are a beautiful blur of pick and preserve,

of pausing to delight in the precious pleasure dwindling summer days...

Hold back the mellow, yellow haze seeping through sheen of summer green

And bar the gate where morrows wait to toss echoes from hill to hill

And keep at bay dusk’s blue and gray that draws today to what-has-been

Where farewells waft somewhere aloft but close enough to spark a chill

Delay the woo that will undo the lullaby in woodland tress

Abate the tide that turns the countryside to works of autumn art

And pause the haste that lays to waste summer-wild and chaste happiness

...and strive to slow the letting go that tugs at ties wound through the heart

Postpone the thrill of standing stock-still, stunned by sweeps of gold and rose

Oh, stay the hand that weighs the sand that falls through summer’s sanguine skies

Appease the want for flower-font and garden dirt between our toes

Extend the boon of sunny afternoon regaled with butterflies

Stoke summer’s dying ember, dear September, gild its darling dust

With prolonged trace of Queen Ann’s lace to grace commonplace avenues

Kiss the lament of summer spent with plums, and throes of harvest-lust

Ah, time enough to spill the Stuff that unfurls Autumn’s thund’ring hues

© Janet Martin

now, off to dig potatoes because I discovered they are starting to rot!!

due to all the rain.

Happy September Saturday to you!

And FINALLY, the kind of forecast we have been waiting for all summer!!

It Gets Me Every Time

 

Although officially it is still summer, 

the end of August often has an 'End of Summer' feel!

This is the time of year when neither days or nights are quite long enough!

As Granddaughter helped me in the kitchen a few days ago

I had a profound sense of 'olden' days renewed; 

she is such a mix of all three of our daughters!

The way that seasons sweep across the countryside with ease

A burst of song released to steep and toss the tress of trees

A lovely leaf and flower happiness enhancing earth

Until life’s brief encounter yields to death, conceived at birth

It gets me every time; each sweet and fleeting season-span

Portraying in its lilt and chime the numbered days of man

The way the bud-loom brims, dazzles and dims; show-stoppers bow

Beneath weaning rhythms and winds that always stun, somehow

Though green of youth has always yielded to the woo of years

(The weathered stance of truth unshaken by century-peers)

It gets me every time; the way moment-silk spins and weaves

Bygone’s gossamer clime with all love celebrates and grieves

The way what may seem small becomes the measure of a life

The way the writing on the wall is always running rife

Where endings and beginnings meld one season to the next

A treasure briefly held then felled; love, gladly, sadly vexed

It gets me every time; the way footfalls compose a song

The tempo of its pantomime, so-long, so-long, so-long

© Janet Martin

Eccles.12:1

Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth,

 Before the difficult days come, 

And the years draw near when you say,

 “I have no pleasure in them”:

Echo Snow

 

Treasuring these summer days

before they fall in echo-snow....

Composed of moments none can see or feel with hands and feet

Aftermath of Reality, surreal and bittersweet

A collection of frames unfurled in worlds of yesterday

Cast of cadence and colors swirled, where echoes go to play

How seamlessly one season slips into the next, and strews

Behind, ethereal eclipses that dawn-to-dusk accrues

As love both celebrates and grieves the double edge of joys

A hill stippled with harvest-sheaves; a room emptied of noise

How steadily the ooh and aah of highs and lows arrange

An Intangible Panorama of what none can change

The habits of time undeterred; happiness of hello

Soon farewell-teared/tiered and Bygone-blurred where echoes ebb and flow

How soon the blue-green scenery of June turns August gold

Summer’s subtle origami tunes echoes, fold on fold

A brutal bliss of hug and kiss, hold hinged to letting go

As compilations of What Is turns into echo-snow

© Janet Martin

Chocolate Zucchini Bundt Cake

Like Sea-song...

 

Time rushes through heart doors and rolls like sea-song into memories

It roars through dreams where nothing seems to faze the toll it takes with ease

It grins and thins blue-sky July like pigment on a painter’s tray

While a collection of impressions, like blown bubbles, wafts away

And draws us nearer to that place we all approach with every breath

The grace of where we are is scarred with mementos of life and death

Magnificence of innocence soon stripped of luster of first leaf

How soon we start to recognize the bloom of every bud is brief

Ah, today does not bat an eye as it marches through you and me

Turning the future into past, cast in ethereal imagery

As, what was once so riveting and all-encompassing becomes

A trail of seasons scattered like flower petals and cookie crumbs

Where, while time rushes through us like sea-song that rolls across the shore

The older that we get we pause to hear its music more and more

© Janet Martin

I Linger For a Reason...

'This is the last time for this', said a girl in my Grade 6 Sunday School class yesterday, slowly running fingers over the back of the chairs around the table. (our summer kid's programs at church are run  a bit differently and in September she will be graduated from the grade 1-6 format) Her sentimentalism tugged at my heart as I replied, 'oh my dear, get used to saying that, because everything in life is but a little season..." This girl also used to be in my childcare so I have an extra-motherly place in my heart for her💖

Yesterday I sent the link below, from ten years ago

 to my daughters after someone happened across it,

reminding me of poems long forgotten....

Of Realizations and Routines

the thoughts still as relevant now as then, 

just with different 'pictures' attached

These two incidences are part of what inspired this poem

as well as tugging the tomato cages from peony-past bushes 

to take to the vegetable garden to try

to squeeze overgrown tomato plants into...

(sometimes trying to be thrifty/frugal has its challenges!!)

Some gardening-lingering...

some supper-lingering

some between-task lingering...

I linger where the vibrant vistas of first summer sweep

I loiter in the arbor draped with mauve wisteria plume...

(it was a delicious sunshine and thunderstorm day!!)

I linger for a reason, where the flower bower brims

Where the new day is breaking and where ebbing daylight dims

I linger in the laughter and the chatter of a child

Beneath the dappled rafter of leaf-song, wind-tossed and wild

I loiter in the arbor draped with mauve wisteria plume

And girded with the regal stance of hollyhocks in bloom

I linger where the vibrant vistas of first summer sweep

And at the cradle where the little baby lies asleep

I linger where raindrops tap-dance and where the thunder rolls

And laneway rivers eddy into divots, dips and holes

And where the colors of the world spin on a carousel

Of winter, spring, summer and fall in breath-stealing farewell  

I linger where the fledgling cheeps and spreads its wings to fly

And at the window framing scenes that roll beneath the sky

And in a doorway torn between looking back and ahead

Caught off guard by impressions of a life loosed from its thread

...in rooms where echoes waft where noise and messes used to be

where mother lost her patience with her precious company

after tripping over shoes left where she now lingers, oh

and traces fingers over places primed with letting go

I linger where the robin sings and where the finches flit

I linger in the garden for the dear, sheer joy of it

Where bare feet dash and flash through green pastures of innocence

Into the rude awakening of choice and recompense 

I linger, just to love the touch and feel of here and now

To sense the glove of Father's Time's hand brush across my brow

I linger for a reason that is ruthless in its art

Where 'everything a season' steals small pieces of my heart 

Janet Martin

I linger where raindrops tap-dance and where the thunder rolls

And laneway rivers eddy into divots, dips and holes...