To Hope's Newest Enterprise...

Dawn is a vale kissed with soft purple mist and cricket-song...

It is good to give thanks to the Lord,
    to sing praises to your name, O Most High; 

 to declare your steadfast love in the morning,
    and your faithfulness by night,

to the music of the lute and the harp,
    to the melody of the lyre.

For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work;
    at the works of your hands I sing for joy.

Ps.92:1-4

Soft cricket song cascades across time’s waking enterprise

The Maestro touches his baton to morning’s blushing skies

And from the throats of nature’s choristers swell notes of praise

To He who grants His grace to mankind’s learning, yearning ways

The world is like a graveyard filled with tears and years, and yet

In folds of pink upon the brink of earth Hope is reset

And we are not forgotten, no, in spite of ignorance

As He who grants His mercy plants the air with evidence

Ah, what is man that God is mindful of his needy call?

And who can understand the mind of He who knows it all?

The greedy gall of human nature ought to damn our days

Still, He who grants His goodness sets the dark of dawn ablaze

Faith is the substance of things hoped for but no one can see

We grapple with mortal weakness and mortal tendency

While the Immortal comforts and astounds this begging breed

And grants to our helplessness His Power to succeed

...where Time is like a table laden with hope’s latest feast

As much as we are able we should pray, then take and eat

While cricket song cascades across the landscape of our sighs

To He who grants His Providence to hope’s new enterprise

© Janet Martin

Ready For Then

In the past month and a bit, Death has reminded me of its nearness like never before!
My neighbor's elderly dad sits in his easy-chair waiting for her to come and pick him up to go out for groceries.
Instead Death comes and whisks him away...

My husband's co-worker's son dies (age 38) in the middle of a conversation; brain aneurysm

My sister-in-law's mother; (age 74)cancer returns and death visits four weeks after diagnosis.

My cousin's wife, a mother and new gramma (mid-forties) drowns.

I return home from her funeral yesterday, walk into the house, my daughter hands me the phone and my neighbor-friend tells me her friend just passed away (age 30-ish) due to complications from pneumonia...

On Fri. night my parent's friend, a seemingly healthy 74 year old man who just returned home from a wedding (he was the minister who performed the marriage ceremony) dies suddenly from a massive stroke.

How much we should treasure moments with loved ones.

 Take a lesson from the birds maybe?

Moments don’t sleep

They turn to days and weeks

Months into years

…and then, comes Death

In one half-breath

A lifetime disappears

Ah, talk is cheap

No one can keep

The hand of time at bay

And none knows when

Death’s final Then

Will seal life’s breath away

This little lot

Of lilting jot

Before forevermore

Is like a hill

Of days until

Death bares An Awesome Door

Moments don’t sleep

No one can keep

Death from this breath of sod

This is the day

The Lord has made

To ready us for God

© Janet Martin

 "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.

Matt.24:42

Commiting to 'I Do'

Today's Poetic Blooming form challenge is the Quintain Cascade.

 Read more about this form here.

You make me say and do some things I thought I never would

The naughty and the nice become you more than most, ‘tis true

That day when I first met you my intentions were so good

How much you’ve taught me while I thought that I was teaching you

I want to be your student, love, all of my lifetime through

You lavish me with kisses and the innocence of words

And darling, you stir me in ways like nobody else could

You are the smallest, biggest blessing in the whole wide world

My, my, when I first held you I knew love was pure and good

You make me say and do some things I thought I never would

You teach me how to linger longer while throngs thunder by

I’ve fallen quite in love with living, all because of you

And often when the day would be gray with life’s weary sigh

You startle me with laughter like nobody else can do

The naughty and the nice become you more than most, ‘tis true

Sometimes I fail you; but you are oblivious to ‘can’t’

There is no quitting, even when love is misunderstood

You put your arms around me in the middle of a rant

And hold nothing against me even though I know you could

The day when I first met you my intentions were so good

You are not cumbered with the care of what others might say

And time is of no matter; ‘will you help me find my shoe?’

‘Will you read me a story?’ Where, oh where, along the way,

Do we become too rushed to lie beneath time’s sky-high blue?

How much you’ve taught me while I thought that I was teaching you

Master, mistress of your domain, love’s biggest, smallest charge

God knows I’m quite unfit to commit to the likes of you

Yet, since we’ve met you’ve taught me to love and live, free and large

Though I am middle-age and you are only half-past two

I want to be your student, love, all of my lifetime through

© Janet Martin

To Those Who Pause Upon This Porch...

I’d like to think that when you come

Your time is not wasted, but oh,

That when you leave you’ve found a crumb

Of joy to cheer you as you go

This walk of life that we are in

Is such a comrade-needing Here

I’d like to think that when you leave

You know that you are loved, my dear

To those who pause upon this porch

I pray for you, both near and far

And smile, to know God’s love can touch

You, who and wherever you are

© Janet Martin

When I pray I don't need to know your names

Or who-where you are because God does:)

Thank-you for dropping by!

When Mortal Woe The Will of Courage Tries...

When mortal woe the will of courage tries

And forces us to think of more than This

When we look at our hands and realize

How small and dependent their Doing is

When time, as its slips by beneath the sun

(The way that it has always done, and yet)

We start to see, in seasons as they run

Like rivers full of leaf, to summer’s set

… and Something we cannot attain, but strain

Toward, the way hungering man will do

Because we want assurance to sustain

Us in life’s compromises we pass through

When grope-grope-groping, the heart longs for song

But cannot find the notes to fit the tongue

When hope-hope-hoping we try to be strong

But hope needs more than hope to lean upon

When mortal woe the will of courage tries

And forces us to think of more than This

Oh, pray that we may come to realize

Hope’s absolute assurance of God IS

© Janet Martin

 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!

 In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope 

through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,

1 Pet.1:3

We can never understand God's ways fully,

But Here are glimpses of who He is...

(Follow the link, then follow the links to each word) 

Love the third-fourth line in this song...

'what more can he say than to you He hath said? 

To you who for refuge to Jesus have fled!'

...another fav by Fernando