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…

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.

C.S. Lewis  TheReality of the Spiritual

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