Outside the World is White and Gray

 It's been a week where landscape and sky are a seamless sweep of white-ish-gray...

Outside the world is white and gray

And summer seems so far away

With its bare feet and bloom-spun nook

And lilies wading in the brook

Outside the leafless world is tossed

By gales that seem surly and lost

They reel across field, wood and lake

Surreal, the silence in its wake

No fences frilled with flower-bells

Or haunt of fern or green-moss dells

Where fairies flit, no gnome or sprite

To roam this sweep of knee-deep white

Outside the world half-dark and stark

Is like a still-life work of art

No color warms this painter’s tray

Outside the world is white and gray

© Janet Martin

To You, Dear Day

 From Emily's Quest

I should know you, darling

Without surprise you spill

Your faithful light of morning

Over the far blue hill

You tug from moor and meadow

Midnight’s muted manteau

You ease away the shadow

Where dusk bid us adieu

And I should fully know you

Tell me, how it can be

That after all these years, love

You still surprise me

You veil within your bearing

That which none can predict

You heed to commandeering

Of time’s law and edict

I guess I’ll never know you

By much more than your name

For no two of you, darling

Are ever quite the same

© Janet Martin

After A Few More Lifetimes

After a few more life-times

Perhaps then I will succeed

At turning all the pages of

Each book I want to read

After a few more life-times

The stack beside by bed

On end-tables and in my mind

Will be tagged, 'books I’ve read'

After a few more lifetimes

Maybe then I’ll beg and plead

That after living for so long

I’ve nothing left to read

But, after a few more lifetimes

I will see I read in vain

Because then I will want for time

To read favorites again

© Janet Martin

For those of us who love to read and write  the word 'bored' is not part of our vocabulary!

A Flight to the Finish-line...of Flowers

 After a few snowy, blowy days winter's late arrival seems forgotten!

Then, true to form he came, storming earth’s motley frame of trees

Infamous for his bully ways he brawled all through the night

And howled all through the morning-noon, he wrung a thousand seas

His tardiness forgotten as he swathed the world with white

No more the brooding loneliness of bronze wide-open fell

No more the moody platinum of lowered heavens weep

Now hill and rill, now nook and crook and every dip and dell

Is like a featherbed spread with pillows and throws knee-deep

To everything there is a time and season; columbine

And violet and daffodil and kindred perfumed plume

Are evermore the sweeter for their slumber where the vine

Is brittle for a little while then refurbished with bloom

So, while the wind whimpers at doors and wails at windowpanes

And Old Man Winter is a troubadour of chilling verse

Pour summer’s sought-for second cups and dream a dream of lanes

Fragrant with newborn flowers that soon springtime will disperse

© Janet Martin

Hang in there y'all...it's a fight to the finish-a flight to flowers:)

...and butterflies

...and sun-kissed sand

...and sunset beaches

 

...a finish-line of gold

...and blue

 ...and green

Bugle-call...A Rubaiyat

I.

The sky is old; as old as Day and Night

Yet we are still dumbfounded by the sight

Of stars, or how dawn breathes yon gates ajar

And dusk returns to gather up the light

II.

Nature does not forget; a Faultless Hand

Refurbishes the fortunes in its strand

They slumber, bedded in earth’s umber deep

Waiting to waken in Spring’s Promised Land

III.

Both morning-tide and eventide convey

A hierarchy greater than Night and Day

It decorates the dust with mighty hills

That spill blue shadows where light ebbs away

IV.

Man plans but his scope of vision is small

His grandstands hosting boast-and-toast soon fall

Like leaves beneath tall trees, their birthright spent

Where time’s attention span outgrows us all

V.

The spigot whereby mankind seeks his quaff

That God turned on and has not yet turned off

Is a Terminal and Terrible Thing

Which only fools disdain with aimless scoff

VI

Sometimes we bloat ourselves with ignorance

That clothes itself as Knowledge and we dance

In glass slippers until the clock strikes twelve

Then, suddenly we see Time’s crass romance

VII.

Ah, we should often look up at the stars

To marvel at midnight’s unbroken bars

Where words unuttered by daylight appear

In dialects not tainted by ink jars

VIII.

The resting place of seasons none can breach

Its everlasting breadth evades man’s reach

Yet as we grapple with these laws of loss

Life’s albatross renders what it must teach

IX.

This exhibition-place of greed and need

This hope-and-grace dependent human-breed

Would be a living hell of want and wish

If by its bread alone we could succeed

X.

A fool in his own eyes seems very wise

He drinks an elixir of well-dressed lies

Then forgets what manner of man he is

…a ready prey for wolves in sheep’s disguise

XI.

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; learn their ways

Lower art thou than the bug who obeys

His Maker; then, do not forfeit The Crown

By languishing too early on Death’s chaise

XII.

Hand to the plow, the spade, the pen, the broom

Already the exploit of moments bloom

Upon the midday clock that holds the key

That will unlock the Gate to God or Doom

XIII.

Did the Lamplighter of Time’s wick detail

The Very Tittle of its last exhale?

Ah yes, but not even the angels know

When He will crush to naught Time’s Awesome Grail

XIV.

Because of Calvary God made a way

For fallen man to hope through That Last Day

This groping-coping interlude of strife

That we call life is but a little Stay

XV.

Time’s tick and tock ah, gossamer transport

To a goal made for souls none can abort

Its countdown is like a holy bugle-call

‘Oh who will come and who will trust the Lord?’

XVI.

The sky is old; as old as Day and Night

And we are still dumbfounded by the sight

Of it; a drop within eternity

Come, bow the knee before God snuffs the Light

© Janet Martin

Sasha's Interlocking Rubaiyat poems lured me to try a Rubaiyat, 

then after reading The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyan

 I couldn't resist!
Not quite as alluring as the Interlocking Rubaiyat but still, an enjoyable form to write to...