Mighty Metamorphosis or Torch-bearer

 I have a little book entitled Passages of Kindness; 

This quote is on the back cover ...

 A kind word is a treasure we can all afford

The kind word that you said to me

Shaped today’s gray into a smile

So I could brighten up and be

The light to someone else’s mile

And they in turn took heart and held

The hand of someone down and out

Where torch-and-burden-bearers meld

Into what love is all about

© Janet Martin

A Bitty-Ditty on 'Do Not Quitty'

(Above excerpt from Uncle Tom's Cabin)

Oh, take your place and fill its space

With all you have to give

Because to all alike, one life

Is all we have to live

So do not shirk its common work

Or want and wish in vain

Because to all the same, each frame

Will never pass again

…then do not quit; the sum of it

Much more than we can see

For how we choose to use each day

Becomes our legacy

© Janet Martin

Humbly Glad For The Love I've Had...

 Sometimes I play this song to others,

Sometimes I play it to myself😏

I have been loved

What can I say?

In spite of my failures and fumbles

And stumbles and grumbles

And glaring flaws

I’m loved anyway

So, I’ll be humbly glad

For the love I’ve had…

While my track-record

Of foibles grows fat

And I’m middle-age

And likely won’t change

I’ve been hated

For far less than that

© Janet Martin

Poem-pangs...

PAD Challenge 14; For today’s prompt, write a hungry poem. 

Impossible to satisfy the wish and whim of you

A catch-your-breath soliloquy of season’s flight, the flue

Fused to a furnace deep within where poet’s hunger burns

The fire of desire fueled by Time’s No Returns

Impossible to satisfy the want and need of you

Where what is penned is not the end but the threshold of New

Where every hour kindles from the embers of its flare

Fresh flame that leaps toward a storehouse heaped upon the air

Impossible to satisfy the ways and means of you

To write is but to soothe the wounds where brooding whispers woo

And wonder runs its thunder through the belly of a sigh

To trigger the awareness of a poem slipping by

Impossible to satisfy the urge and angst of you

No Magnum Opus stills the tempest sparked by twilight blue

Where earth's extravagant buffet is spread 'neath star-glossed height

To tease and please the poet’s insatiable appetite

© Janet Martin