No Time Like The Present (#2)

 

Pad Challenge Day 14:  For today’s prompt, pick a popular saying and make that the title of your poem; then, write your poem.

No time like Present, love

Dawn draws its wraps away

Where we like children hug and tug

Gossamer gold and gray

To find within its folds

What no one holds for long

For renaissance is soon ensconced

In haunts of yester-song

The bower of new day

Soon spills its flower where

The hour of its live-laugh-love

Lilts on the stilly air

© Janet Martin

Embrace the Present

Caught between missing what no longer is

And wondering what yet will be

Filled with a feeling of sad emptiness

As I sense you slipping from me

What good is sorrow; why sift through life’s gold

To finger the silt in its pock?

I must embrace the present in my hold

Ere vaults close that never unlock

This is life’s beautiful, breath-stealing trade

Everything comes, but to pass

We cannot barter with moment-parades

Or flip Time’s grand hour-glass

While we were dreaming you learned how to dance

While we were dancing, I knew

Sooner or later your feet would find wings

…my heart must learn to fly too

So, embrace the present and then let it be 

Lest in thought’s bittersweet trance

Somehow we miss its gladsome melody

And sadly forget how to dance

© Janet Martin

Fulcrum

 

All those things that we recall are molded where Now-moments fall

Future hinges onto Past

Ether-spectrum arching where

Present ever spreads its path

Fulcrum of our 'here to there'

Everything exists in Now

What once was or yet will be

We cannot  touch or bestow

Rearrangements to its lea

Now; a state forever fixed

Through our touch Time wends its way

Present is the binding twixt

Tomorrow and Yesterday

Awesome, ephemeral Now

Future leans potency on

Present's mystic moment-flow

And the shadows it will spawn

Janet Martin

Tomorrow's Hope

PAD challenge Day 10: write a future poem

The future has a funny way

Of turning into past

This little cup we call Today

Is emptied far too fast

All Unknown in tomorrow lies

No one can know its lot

The future, though we fantasize

Is never what we thought

I could not bear today’s regale

Or hear its melody

If someone drew aside the veil

From morrow’s mystery

We chase the sun across the skies

Yet every night it slips

Into an ocean of Good-byes

Beyond our finger-tips

One foot and then the other, love

Through both life’s good and ill

Tomorrow never really comes

Yet is today’s refill

The Hand from which Time’s moment’s rain

In gasps of joy or sorrow

Does not falter but will remain

Beneath every tomorrow

© Janet Martin

 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Heb. 13:8

When I Dreamed You...

When I dreamed you

You laughed

And played

Into my fantasy

But now you’re here

Those phantoms years

Morphed to Reality

Today
There isn’t much about you

That I can quite recall

But simply this;

You’re nothing like

I pictured you at all

© Janet Martin

Yesterday something suddenly sparked words of a wise friend.

Janet, she murmured, ‘the future is never like we pictured it, is it?

Of Present Tasks

Sometimes the grief of what is not

Torments and tests our purest thought

The anguish of our heart’s desire

Ignites a raw and raging fire

Sometimes the void of what has been

In all its scratched, imperfect sheen

Threatens to rob us of the joy

As guilt and blame and shame deploy

Sometimes the aftermath of choice

Yields harvests hard to ever voice

As in our heart of hearts we bear

The consequences of its care

Sometimes, the weight of wanting burns

As haunting of failure returns

But God is faithful; if we ask

He fits us for our present task

© Janet Martin

Happiness is Happening...

Happy is he who has learned to be

Content in the moment he holds

Instead of wishing for what seems missing

And searching until he is old

Happy are they who have found the way

To taste the moment on their lips

Instead of yearning for past’s no returning

As into the past, present slips

© Janet Martin

Happiness is happening,

Don't miss it!

 Happy is the man that finds wisdom, and the man that gets understanding.
Prov.3:13 KJV

The Vexation of the Unknown...

We cannot write away longing or desire

Nor diminish space by the hex of poetry

But we can languish in a syllable’s fire

And revel in the vexing of what still might be

J~

Time-scape

Behind us slumbers our Past,

A mind-scape only we can see

Before us gleams the Future, vast

A vale of trembling mystery

Beneath us slips the Present, brief

A smooth and subtle under-tow

Above us, from infinity

Is He who ordains Mercy’s flow

© Janet Martin

The Barred Gate

We can’t return to the ‘before’

There is no back-to-history door

We cannot retrace one hour

Nor force to bud again, the flower

We cannot undo the ‘done’

Or retrieve a moment gone

Onward, upward is this climb

We cannot go back in time

Swift these transient morsels slip

Fleeting vapor on the lip

Over ramparts we have built

Pleasure, victory, shame or guilt

We can’t return to the ‘before’

Yesterday has sealed its door

Live well the moment you are in

For it will not pass again

© Janet Martin