Monday, September 8, 2014

Not Everything IS As It Seems...Monday is a Minuet





Poetry is a pen’s luxury
September is the weather of wishes
Love is a language disguised by heaps
Of laundry and dirty dishes
 
Hope is the smile of a flowering child
A gate is the sky of the morning
Want is that breath-stealing blindness of touch
Tiptoeing in without warning

Prayer is the feather whereby faith takes flight
Song is the laughter of feeling
Goodness and mercy, ah, this is the night
Dazzled with star-sequined ceiling

Word is a warrior wafted on air
Thought is a dreamer’s vexation
A book is a paper chariot, love
Time is a timeless temptation

Summer is sorrow gift-wrapped in blue eyes
Toil is a tempest of trouble
Chance is a fool whereon fools rely
Life is a wee-bitty bubble

© Janet Martin

With Slower, Sweeter Yen...





With slower, sweeter yen then let us dare
To climb where Time invites the limb to wear
Its colors preordained and none of us
Are able to evade its touch because
There is no detour round the ticking clock
Of spring-to-summer, fall-to-winter block

What derelict response to disregard
The edict of a Hand wiser by far
We cling to strings and tatters; summer’s rose
Is destined as are we to Death’s repose
The rubric of a thousand schemes is vain
Come now, tis futile to kick and complain

With slower, sweeter yen then let us drink
The ink of present-tense before the pink
Of slumber-set embellishes the west
And we relinquish it as the request
Of what is yet to be rouses a storm
Where we are subject to its moment-form

God’s pen is double-edged and deep and wide
Earth turns beneath His pledge of season-tide
Where we, His most beloved trample Time’s dirt
And often rush headlong into its hurt
Where there are no refills; dawn spills again
Come; let us drink with slower, sweeter yen

© Janet Martin

Almost breathless with anxiety I purveyed this week’s long to-do list
and almost missed the sun as it kissed life’s highway with gold
before climbing into its sky-yonder blue where every to-do list will melt in its hold…

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Alzheimers





The years have whittled away
More than memories
Her plumpness reduced to skin and bones
Beneath a cotton sheet
Where she is babied and mothered
While she traces the air
Looking for a lifetime of Something
She lost somewhere

© Janet Martin

My daughter Emily is overcome with pity and love  for the people she cares for at a long-term care facility.

...On Feeling a Feeling





…the value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.


I feel for you more than pen will allow
To proportion into word
And foolish-like sometimes, somehow
I forget that eons heard
The song of it long, long before
I was stirred by its melody
Darling, the more I hear of it
The more it vexes me
For I feel in its very bearing
All it can never become
And even as I’m wearing
Its ‘welcome home-sweet-home’
I feel an hour stealing
Its very breath from me
Yet, all I have is feeling
A stranger’s sympathy

© Janet Martin

Just e-mailed Melissa because I miss her...

Chimera





Unmoored now, it seems you hasten
As we on leaf-lorn lea
Perceive you, a frigate laden
With nevermore will be

Immortal cargo you carry
How quick a season culls
Every eat-drink-be merry
Into unyielding hulls

Leaving in your wake an ocean
Of ripple-song engraved
Where thought’s guttural emotion
Is raw and ill-behaved

Yet no terms of endearment
Will draw you back to shore
Here goes another summer then
Heave ho and au revoir

Unmoored now it seems you hasten
Upon a sea of years
A chimeral frigate laden
Where summer disappears

© Janet Martin

...from a sauna-like afternoon to a sharp-shivery morning; September