Complete Confidence

PAD Challenge 24: For today’s prompt, take the phrase “Complete (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then write your poem.

My dear, we are not on our own

(Although some days it may seem so)

The One who frames soul’s skin and bone

Is with us wherever we go

Then, when we feel a little small

Beside life’s tall mountain or task

He waits to help us through it all

And all we need to do is ask

© Janet Martin

 Philippians 4:13

 I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

To My Family and Friends (with my blessing)

PAD Challenge 23: Time for our fourth (but not final) Two for Tuesday of the month! 

Pick one prompt or use both…your choice! 

1. Write a free poem.
2. Write a not free poem.

 Seems everything I dream is part of you...

You have taken (with my blessing)

What I used to call ‘me free time’

You make me feel undeserving

Of love's (often uphill) climb

Strange how we change what we wish for

From footloose and fancy-free

To the best life has to offer

When love turns ‘me’ into ‘we’

Once upon a long-gone freedom

I would dread The To-do List

That was before you and me and

All the love we would have missed

Love fills up life’s cup of laughter

And because not much is free

Love drains all but echoes after

Life turns time to memory

Keep on taking (with my blessing)

The 'me free time' I hear tell of

Because after Us there's nothing

I would rather have than love

© Janet Martin

As long as we love

there will always be

So much to do

and so little time!

Dear Father Time

PAD Challenge day 22: For today’s prompt, write a correspondence poem.

A new baby(for us a grand-daughter)

 always re-impacts me with the penmanship of Father Time...

photo credit: Brittany Ruppert

Dear Father Time, my, but your ink runs wild

I am grandmother yet I'm still a child

Beneath your touch, always fluent and firm

So much to let go and so much to learn

Salt-seasoned reasons to live, love and laugh

Beneath the flourish of your autograph

While round and round your carousel twirls

Slipping strange costumes over little girls

Bound to the beauty of duty and rhyme

Found in the truth of you, dear Father Time

Teach me to cherish the stroke of your pen

Teach me to teach morrow’s women and men

Teach me to walk, not weighed down with Unknown

But plant my feet on the street you set down

Now, drinking deep from the well of your ink

While a life-story is spilling its wink

While glory-days are not some far-off Thing

But the soft flutter, like butterfly’s wing

So, teach me to reach for flowers blooming grand

Dear Father Time, in the hours at hand

© Janet Martin

Sacred Sketch-pad

PAD Challenge say 21: For today’s prompt, write a sketch poem. 

Yesterday's 'sketch-pad' groaned with laden tables 

lovingly furnished by a fantastic cook; my sister-in-law! 

Easter celebrations included much precious family time

celebrating Something/Someone nothing/no one can erase;

 Life through Jesus' death and resurrection!

 "Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. 

Let nothing move you. 

Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord,

 because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain."

1 Cor.15:58 

Today's sketch-pad wears more modest Musts but with Sacred Purpose.

Praying His wonder to thunder through our blunders today!

Soft, as darkness dims to gray

Spreads the canvas of new day

Lend-ed to this earthy race

From a splendid hand of grace

Where dawn’s orchestra of Light

Fills these frames of faith with sight

Creator and creature meet

On Time’s featured music-sheet

Thought and deed’s intrinsic font

Wakes the war of will and want

Where the page soon wears love’s voice

God within unveiled through choice

Soft, on crofts of borrowed Here

Mingles dust of trust and tear

Where the artist and the art

Wrangle, torn twixt head and heart

Aware of the dye that flows

Through Time’s Certain Curtain Close

© Janet Martin