Where Summer Fell

From time’s loom tumbles russet thread

Red, bronze, amber and persimmon

Before it weaves brown, brittle leaves

To what no hand retrieves; Bygone

We grapple with its arabesque

Where what is woven disappears

Half-Poems crushed and gently brushed

To wash the world in leaf-shaped tears

I want for naught but to embrace

This petal-portioned push and pull

Lest, like summer its gossamer

Unravels in spice-pumpkin tulle

From time’s loom tumbles tick and tock

In russet, gold and cinnamon

Where no one can persuade its clock

To still what it is bent upon

...and every tree, a leafed belfry

And every leaf a tolling bell

Awaits its turn to fill the urn

Of no return where summer fell

© Janet Martin

Are You Time or Are You Love?

Sometimes I lose all sense of you

You change yet never do

Sometimes you wear the soft-blurred cloth of mist

Sometimes clear blue

And sometimes you are summer’s tree

Embellishing the dark

With leaf-song, sometimes you are silhouettes of something

Stripped and stark

Sometimes you fill the sky with sighs

Akin to pain

And sometimes you slip by in flower-shaped good-byes

Sometimes you drain

The pen of poetry; sometimes you fill the quill;

it overflows

In madrigals of ecstasy the color

Of a rose

Sometimes I reach but cannot touch

The Thing I’m living for

While you brush back my hair and dare

My heartbeat to explore

The curve and verve and trace of you

Sometimes I cannot tell

Who are you? Time,

Or are you love

Or simply its farewell?

© Janet Martin

Where Dust Spills Its Grail...a poem on Love

Love bears all things, believes all things, and love will never fail

Though the reward God promised, flesh and blood cannot avail

But in this heart-and-foot-borne second-mile-worn humble price

Love bears all things, believes all things and suffers sacrifice

Love does not seek its own nor tally its shortfalls and such

But forgives a slew of discrepancies beneath its touch

Love; Mystery of Heaven satisfying sons of earth

Where giving is receiving and where death to self is birth

Love; who can understand it or explain with syllables

This simple-complex entity that vexes and fulfills?

Our comfort and our sorrow; God in us, dust spills its grail

…Love bears all things, believes all things and love will never fail

© Janet Martin

 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. 1 John 4:16

Once Upon a Cross Upon a Hill Called Calvary

 Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved." Acts 4:12

Oh, once upon a cross upon a hill called Calvary

A Once for All Sacrifice gave His life for you and me

No one can arrogate it and no offering annul

The once for all Atonement Jesus Christ has paid in full

Faithful through mortal ages the Pledge of Redemption stands

Sealed by the blood of Jesus, signed with heaven’s nail-scarred hands

No note can nullify it and no sinner can exceed

The grace that poured from Christ the Lord to satisfy man’s Need

What masses deemed as failure, as His lifeless form they saw

Upon a love-begotten cross, rent The Veil and The Law

For blood of bulls and rams could never satisfy God’s wrath

Where His own Son laid down His life on broken man’s behalf

Then come, lift high the glory-song of Hope with every breath

For once upon a cross upon a hill Christ conquered death

By death; He overcame the world even as ages roll

The power of the cross abides; The Saviour of the soul

© Janet Martin