When Only Souls Remain...

 On Sunday morning's at our church we are studying a thought-provoking series on Heaven...

Time’s sum can sometimes escape us

We get so caught up in life’s chase

That we are apt to forget just

How temporal is this mortal race

Sometimes time’s sum can startle us

With fall’s swift smattering of leaves

As its stretches the heart of us

With love and loss’s memories

Time’s sum will sometime meet us where

The chill of death will stilly fall

When face to face with God we stare

Into the meaning of it all

© Janet Martin

But understand this: 

If the homeowner had known at what hour the thief was coming, 

he would not have let his house be broken into.

 You also must be ready,  

because the Son of Man will come at an hour you do not expect.”  

Luke 12:39-40

Next To Me...

Day is hushed

Its vista brushed

With velvet rush

Of ebony

Oh darling, why

When the night-winds sigh

Do I wish you

Were next to me?

It is not far

To where you are

Dark cannot bar

Thought’s entity

I press a prayer

To midnight’s air

And feel here

Right next to me

© Janet Martin

A Toast To The Inevitable...

The yard is like a fall postcard

 A picture-poem of joy and grief

As summer, pink and petal-starred

Unravels in the shape of leaf

To gardens stripped of gourd and plume

And fellowship of flower-chum

Where the benediction of bloom

Depicts the quickness of time’s sum

Sometimes it seems that seasons slip

Ever more swiftly from our touch

How deft day’s darling diamonds drip

Into the vastness of past’s clutch

And where the deep green pasture sprang

To lure our feet into its fray

The sere slope steeped in smoky tang

Echoes with steps of yesterday

October’s epitaph of leaves

Is chased about by bullish breeze

Its fills ditches, fencelines and eaves

With nature’s pilfered piracies

Where tree-torches that lit the hills

Are doffed and dimmed to somber hue

The scarlet maple yields its frills

The red sumac surrenders too

…and earth is like a soldered sweep

The keeper of each fond farewell

That seeps into its umber deep

And weeps upon dusk’s tolling knell

Beneath a sheath of crepe and stars

The stricken heath of autumn lies

While we embrace its aches and scars

And toast Time’s purple-tinted sighs

© Janet Martin

Moment-um

With every tick and tock of clock

And every sunset-sea

With every little step we walk

And every breath we breathe

With every word we say or pray

And every thought we think

With each good night and new today

That passes wink-by-wink

With every touch and taste and take

And make-a-memory

We tread a tide that ebbs the wake

Before eternity

With every yes and no we choose

Where dues are certainty

In spite of all that Past accrues

And we no longer see

With each hello, I love you so

And each farewell, my dear

With each hold-close-then-let-it-go

With every smile and tear

The gap twixt here and There recedes

Ah, pray we bend our knee

And ready ourselves for death’s needs

Before eternity

With every drop of rain that plops

And every season weaned

As granaries are filled with crops

And field and furrow gleaned

With every folding of the hand

As we lie down to sleep

And every tucking in of land

Beneath cold winter’s deep

With every seed and every deed

No matter who we be

For one and all our footsteps lead

Into eternity

© Janet Martin

Of Human Interest

 Right now Ontario's highways and byways are full of fall sightseers...

But earth's highways and byways are always full of all-season sightseers

Happy Half-way through October!

There are wonders large 

...and small 

Earth boasts of God in poetry

It hosts volumes of vintage verse

In sweep of sky and land and sea

It sweetens Eden's morbid curse

Earth lisps His lines in laden vines

And cloud-designs scattered aloft

It utters sighs in butterflies

In ellipses pink-petal soft

Who has not heard, as daylight dims

A poem stirred from mist-shirred bars

Dusk sings its hymns in willow-limbs

And writes its poetry with stars

Earth’s ballads beam on gleaming hills

Where teeming flares of fall are splayed

In rhymes that spill their russet frills

Into stilled crypts where death is laid

From whence doth every morning come?

Original, like none before

Dawn is a Tome of perfect poem

Its bards can merely skim its core

Earth flaunts the poetry of God

In haunts of moss and fern and wood

Where leaves applaud and lilies nod

And we all note that ‘it is good’

Beneath the hue of heaven-blue

We minor poets nurse our yens

And will the blood of thought to bud

Into the poetry of pens

But earth exists in poetry

It does not force the Hand that writes

But cups the sea and hugs the tree

While we scavenge timeless delights  

 

Still, how much of its crux we miss

If what we see is all we see

The Author IS the emphasis

Earth simply spells His poetry

© Janet Martin

You alone are the LORD.
You made the heavens,
even the highest heavens,
 and all their starry host,
 the earth and all that is on it,
the seas and all that is in them.
You give life to everything,
and the multitudes of heaven worship you.
Neh.9:6