Of Teenage Green-age

PAD Challenge day 10; For today’s prompt, write a teenage poem.

You are oblivious to Time’s fleet feet; the starry street

Of love and life still virginal; the bud tender and sweet

Your panoramic outlook rife with possibility

Not stricken yet with Relinquishment’s ‘never meant to be’

You are an almost-butterfly still shedding your cocoon

Undaunted by The Swiftness that undoes the afternoon

Your senses keened to fantasies that youth aspires to

No dusty archives in your head as yet to mar the view

You are the future’s wheels in motion forging forward where

The aftermath of Beaten Path leads to more than thin air

Your visage not yet haunted by the echoes of a stream

Your shadow falls behind you as you leap from dream to dream

Where the green-leaf of knowledge primes the vestiges of skill

Time's college full of trade-masters waiting to test sheer will

Before the roar of decades turns the spirit young and free

Into the very people that you vowed never to be…

your parents

© Janet Martin

On The Army of Thought...

 Thought is an army, veiled, we think

Behind our eyes and such

But always revealed by the chink

in its armour, called Touch

 (Above paragraph from the book Uncle Tom's Cabin)

Thought covers eons in a wink

And weighs nary a mite

But meters far more than we think

In fear, hope and hindsight

Thought is a rover and force

That scales what none can see

Save in the very certain course

To which touch will agree

Thought masterminds all kinds of woes

Exceeds the bounds of law

It breeds the seeds that deeds expose

And nothing can withdraw

Thought makes the man; its cravings feast

On what is in the trough

Where Thought must tame and hone the beast

That never gets enough

Thought is perception’s quintessence

An army in a cup

That wrangles with each circumstance

By how we fill it up

© Janet Martin

 Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus:

Who, existing in the form of God,

did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,

but emptied Himself,

taking the form of a servant,

being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man,

He humbled Himself and became obedient to death—

even death on a cross. 

Phil.2:5-8

Of Country Love and Pride

 Zoomed by this fantastic flag-display in rush-hour traffic

 in Charlottetown PEI

Country; more than mud and asphalt

Country; flesh and blood of We

Country; contingent upon the

Commonwealth of family

Country; more than demographics

Country; more than war-fought fame

Country; more than sea of faces

For each face comes with a name

And each name comes with a purpose

And each purpose comes with pride

Pride and love for life and country

Like those who loved both and died

© Janet Martin

Burn-out

PAD Challenge day 9: For today’s prompt, take the phrase “Burn (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. 

The bloom of bud has fizzled

So too, the loom of leaf

The turf of earth is drizzled

With Mother Nature’s grief

The color-world of summer

Then autumn flares and fades

November’s coat is somber

In gray-bronze-umber shades

The dreamer scans new reasons

The garden-guru sleeps

The troubadour of seasons

Finds ink in fallow sweeps

The sky runs out of yellow

Before the day is night

The wind, a forlorn fellow

Preparing for a fight

How still the wooded bower

How hollow is the knell

Where the spire of flower

Has tolled its final bell

© Janet Martin

Happy-mess(Definition; the ability to find Happiness midst The Mess)

 One summer day a little girl asked me if I ever feel like the old woman who lived in a shoe. 

I laughed and told her

 'if I give you all broth without any bread and spank you all soundly and send you to bed' I might! 

I only have two today but I've learned two of certain age/personalities is enough!

It was before their naps,

  after I returned the from-scratch-veggie-soup back to the kitchen counter

 after they spit it back at me a few times 

after I picked up the pizza pieces they chucked to the floor 

...after I picked up the blocks

(because suddenly I stepped on one, once too often)

before I dropped a dish of bite-size ham pieces into the bucket of just-picked-up-blocks,

that I discovered all they really wanted for lunch 

...was the cold kidney-beans fished out of a dish of chili

and they smacked them up almost faster than I could scoop them out,

as if they were little morsels of Swiss chocolate!

Who knew?!

Sometimes we guess that happiness

Lies in some hard-fought goal

Surprised to find some find it in

The beans in a chili-bowl

Sometimes we try too hard to taste

Somebody else’s peach (THAT was at breakfast)

Bent on the Thing we think we need

But simply cannot reach

Sometimes the ‘pudding in our pot’

Might look a lot like dirt

Until we taste it then decide

To have one more for dessert

Sometimes the noisy here and now

Is heaven in a mess

Before the days when we look back

On simpler happiness

© Janet Martin

okay, now I'll try to tiptoe about the kitchen while they nap

 and try to restore some order like

putting the stove-drawer back after retrieving a car

after it rolled under the drawer

and revealed an 'oops, forgot to clean here in a while'

but then we went outside

 before the floor was dry enough to put the drawer back

and when we came in, well...lunch and all that!