Snow-sequins...a sonnet

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 ...yes, she told me she looks for those sequin scarves every night as she passes by:)

She tells me how a sea of sequins spills

From every windowsill; gold pools on snow

To charm the passer-by where winter chills

The dying day; and windows warm the snow

Home-hungry eyes at dusk are searching for

Gold welcome mats when they have miles to go

To their own home-sweet-home and wide-flung door

Spilling in sequin-scarves upon the snow

She tells me when dusk is an envelope

Wherein is tucked day’s final remnant glow

Then every window is a gleam of hope

Pinned to the dark like sequins on the snow

She tells me how snow-sequins wink and say

‘Ah, home is not so very far away’

© Janet Martin

Mercy's Memento

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...Then morning, like a beaming bride

Dawns giddy with hope undeterred

Want’s weighted ways, ah, set aside

For who can hide from heaven stirred

With virgin opportunity?

Bygone clenches its keeping glove

From darling doors we cannot see

God pours to shores of longing, Love

Resistance and persuasion vies

Where faith and fear flounder and fight

Silence thunders with bleeding sighs

on battlegrounds hidden from sight

Stilling, gushing from a fount sky-high

To our hungering embrace

God tilts the lilting thing called Time

And fills our spills and ills with grace

There is no doorway to the Past

To bind us to its suffering

From prisons braved and ever-cast

Emerges a most wondrous Thing

Untouched, unmarred, in spite of us

Morning is not a cruel facade

But Mercy’s memento because

Hope, love and grace abound, from God

© Janet Martin

Sunday Message for Monday to Sunday

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We should not envy others

Nor by that Want enslave

Our thought with burdens not from God

Forgetting what we have

All we have has been given

No boast has anyone

On this walkway from earth to heaven

But this; God sent His Son

Then we should not complain;

Has any suffered more

Than He who made a way for us

From earth to heaven’s shore?

This flesh is not a god

Its temple, dust to dust

If we complain and envy we

Forget to praise and trust

No one is less or more

In the grace-sight of He

Who leans to earth from heaven's door

In holy sympathy

Thus, instead of complaint

Or envying or boast

We should fill our mouths with praise

To He who loves us most

© Janet Martin

Of Wayward Long Ago

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I begged them to come, come to that pretty place of picnic-past, 

but they are too busy with looking ahead to stand here looking back...

The isle of summer sleeps

Beneath sleek, sweeping lakes

Where echoes of love’s gifted glove

On gilded silence breaks

Light laughter rides the gale

That slides across a place

Where none can go save in our thought

To touch each stranger’s face

For Time’s take-giving ways

Of living stuns, its rush

Changes, yet stays strangely the same

In winter’s white-washed hush

Its gallery of trees

Stripped, swaddled, stiff and staid

Evokes a world of memories

Gripped in blue-everglade

And from piano keys

Laid listless on the snow

The air is charged with melodies

Of wayward long ago

© Janet Martin

The Way of Prayer

 

 image source here

Praying for the situation in France...

Way over there

Somewhere

A prayer

Prayed from

A tear

Way

Over here

Will fill

With faith and cheer

The fear

that would be there

Without the prayer

That here

 we prayed

God heard

And laid

His peace upon

You

Over there

For this is His

Answer

To prayer

© Janet Martin


  Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee. Isa.26L3

Winter's Way

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The light stays hid beneath a grid of bars weighted with gray

The sky, a hill of brumal fill and hiemal underlay

Low on the air a growling bear we cannot see but hear

Lumbers across an albatross of tempest-laden sphere

The woods, they say are lovelier in May, but oh, the hush

Where wanting wraps in white starlight each naked limb and bush

Defends its stance of storm-romance and brewing, brooding bliss

As budlets sleep beneath the keep of winter's wresting kiss

The brook sings in a storybook and slumbers in the dell

The hinterland a stifled strand where autumn’s glory fell

Prey to the ways of winter; every meadow is a wink

To lure the footloose wanderer out to the skyline’s brink

There is a wall between the call of firelight and white

The dreamer torn twixt cold and warm to vex his appetite

Where sky-hearths spill not flame but chill; still, something wild and sweet

Lures feet from chairs and slippers to tromp winter’s gilded street

We all are small beneath the rotund swath of cloth and hood

But we must see the majesty of snow parkas on wood

And we must touch and taste and feel Time’s steel-lipped offering

For soon the way of winter will fall prey to lays of spring

…and soon the lays of spring will melt apparel, svelte, ice-white

And soon the tune of May and June will spill in warm delight

And soon the bud will leap from mud and limb in green-frothed fray

Where night unfurled a white, white world, for this is winter’s way

© Janet Martin

…another holi-snowday!