*Food For a Rambling Fancy (phrase from the book Mansfield Park)

Earth splays before man’s won’dring gaze

A plethora of nature-praise

It makes us mind our common ways

Of dirt and hurt and dust

From veiled beginnings leaps a spread

Of leafy minstrels overhead

Of flower filigree soft-bled

Beneath feet-wanderlust

It tunes the heart to rush, in sync

With art of amethyst and pink

It causes us to pause and think

On He who cups its froth

And ordains bud with buxom bloom

Draws from the mud a flaxen loom

That spills to nature’s living room

Earth’s lushest, plushest cloth

…where hope and hunger, subtly wed

 Grapples with green-gold-gray-blue-red

Time’s thoroughfare of joy and dread

An elemental must

…that moves man’s wond’ring gaze to sing

In spite of want and suffering

The author of winter and spring

Is teaching us to trust

© Janet Martin 

I am a country-dweller

Child of her wide-open fell

Raised on wind-song in the willow

Nurtured by garden and dell

Home is a country-side cottage

Hedged by her laughter of trees

Lavished with dusk-violet vesper

Kissed by a lilac breeze

Time is a four-season fellow

Barren to blossom to green

Ere scarlet-bronze-russet-yellow

Starts it all over again

I am a country-dweller

Meadow-lands rush to the sky

Foreign to soaring sky-scrapers

Save for the shadows that lie…

…blue on the burnished fallow

Before darkness lowers its vest

Over the swoop of barn-swallow

Feeding the young in her nest

I am a country-dweller

Dawn is a door to its berth

Where nature’s orchestra trembles

Strumming the harp-chords of earth

© Janet Martin   

The above poem was written four years ago...but I hunted for it after reading those lines

in Mansfield Park last night, finding in Fanny Price a kindly kindred spirit:)

Keeping the Spring-Faith

So far we have not  felt anything even slightly green-leaf-ish...

Cling tight to your free season pass

To green-leaf trees and chairs of grass

To blue-sky domes and flower-poems

Cupped in spring’s warm-wind hourglass

The yard, a postcard of white vim

The fence-post, a statue, gray-grim

Will soon be wreathed in scarves bequeathed

By buds waiting to break and brim

Don’t bow your head in sad lament

Or mope without hope, discontent

Soon we will stroll the lilac knoll

Where once-upon-a-winter went

© Janet Martin

...soon we will stroll the lilac knoll

The Bare Facts of Moment-Matter

 

PAD Challenge day 5: For today’s prompt, write an intelligence poem.

“We cannot choose our external circumstances, 

...but we can always choose how we respond to them” 

Epictetus 

In this buffet of day-to day and choices that we make

We reap or bear the consequence of that which we partake

And though ‘looking won’t hurt us’ as the olden adage quips

Nor will grand gazing help us to enjoy the benefits

…and what perhaps we scoffed a bit with youth’s intelligence

When we thought life was bigger than its flicker of intents

Hits us hard with the truth we were forewarned about by peers

How, how we use mere moments is the dividend of years

The bare fact of the matter in the matter of tick-tock

Is a subtle undoing that can come as quite a shock

As what we once considered 'stuff' of little consequence

Gathers the fluff of moments into rightful recompense

© Janet Martin

Three more scoops of vegetable soup, I encourage as she eyes the 'dessert'. 

(because 'eat your vegetables' matters!😋

To Mortal Intellectuals of Varying Degrees...

PAD Challenge day 5: For today’s prompt, write an intelligence poem.

 Thus says the LORD, 

 "Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, 

and let not the mighty man boast of his might, 

 let not a rich man boast of his riches;  

but let him who boasts boast of this, 

that he understands and knows Me, 

that I am the LORD who exercises lovingkindness, 

justice and righteousness on earth; 

for I delight in these things," 

declares the LORD.…

Jer.9:23-24 

Before one biased breath boasts about Self’s ‘noteworthy’ show

Before one thought brags about strength in a weak moment, oh

Before the truth is proven of how much we really know

It behooves us to reckon the kind grace whereby we go

Before we claim the honor or the ownership of gifts

Look up to where a breath of air the breadth of heaven shifts

And recognize Who paints the skies and downcast eyes uplifts

And grounds us on the dirt that sings with miracles of His

© Janet Martin

Case Closed

PAD Challenge day 4: For today’s prompt, take the phrase “Case (blank);” replace the blank with a word or phrase; make the new phrase the title of your poem; and then, write your poem. Possible titles include: “Case of Water,” “Case in Point,” “Case Study,” and “Case of the Missing Person.”

I hope everyone has a case of easy poeming today!

In case you think

That you could do

Anything to estrange

My love for you

Though act disappoints

And I might disapprove

It can never affect

My measure of love

for you

ever,

Forever

Case closed.

Love, mom

©(aka Janet Martin)

From moms to their sons and daughters...
when you hurt
So do I
When you are disappointed
So am I
When you're happy
I'm happy too!

Case You Wonder If You're The Only One...

PAD Challenge day 4: For today’s prompt, take the phrase “Case (blank);” replace the blank with a word or phrase; make the new phrase the title of your poem; and then, write your poem. Possible titles include: “Case of Water,” “Case in Point,” “Case Study,” and “Case of the Missing Person.”

I hope everyone has a case of easy poeming today!

 

 What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.

Eccles.1:9

 

 

…in case you wonder if you’re the only one?

There is nothing, nothing new under the sun

Everything new is but the jaded roar

Of everything said and done before

On time-tried ways to growing old

There is nothing new for us to behold

Still, aren’t you glad there will always be

The wonderful bliss of discovery?

Sometimes for a time, we feel quite set apart

As we weather the weather that weathers the heart

Then, when we wonder if this has been said, felt or done

Remember, there is nothing new under the sun

© Janet Martin