Alzheimers

The years have whittled away

More than memories

Her plumpness reduced to skin and bones

Beneath a cotton sheet

Where she is babied and mothered

While she traces the air

Looking for a lifetime of Something

She lost somewhere

© Janet Martin

My daughter Emily is overcome with pity and love  for the people she cares for at a long-term care facility.

...On Feeling a Feeling

…the value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.

C.S. Lewis  TheReality of the Spiritual

I feel for you more than pen will allow

To proportion into word

And foolish-like sometimes, somehow

I forget that eons heard

The song of it long, long before

I was stirred by its melody

Darling, the more I hear of it

The more it vexes me

For I feel in its very bearing

All it can never become

And even as I’m wearing

Its ‘welcome home-sweet-home’

I feel an hour stealing

Its very breath from me

Yet, all I have is feeling

A stranger’s sympathy

© Janet Martin

Just e-mailed Melissa because I miss her...

Chimera

Unmoored now, it seems you hasten

As we on leaf-lorn lea

Perceive you, a frigate laden

With nevermore will be

Immortal cargo you carry

How quick a season culls

Every eat-drink-be merry

Into unyielding hulls

Leaving in your wake an ocean

Of ripple-song engraved

Where thought’s guttural emotion

Is raw and ill-behaved

Yet no terms of endearment

Will draw you back to shore

Here goes another summer then

Heave ho and au revoir

Unmoored now it seems you hasten

Upon a sea of years

A chimeral frigate laden

Where summer disappears

© Janet Martin

...from a sauna-like afternoon to a sharp-shivery morning; September

Lifetime Busi-ness

Right now the busyness of living tastes like peaches, tomatoes and all other things 'September'...

This business of living…

…its giving, forgiving,

…its taking, love-making affair

Of having and holding

And molding, enfolding

Our zeniths of joy and despair

Into ever-after

…its learning and laughter

Shaping and testing our Belief

Where we all must do our part

Is not for the faint of heart

Its payday oft maydays of grief

This business of busyness

Duty-dream dizziness

As loss and loveliness form

A deeper knowledge

Not book-learned in college

But beneath Time’s rain and sun dorm

Teaches its students

Love-lessons of Prudence

And accountability

This business of living

Takes as it is giving

Demanding our entirety

So then, let’s get to it

And just simply do it

What profit is base bickering?

For oh, who can tell it?

What whisper will quell it?

…life’s once-lit flame flickering

Thus, we dare not waste it

Nor haste it, but taste it

Savor each flavor full-blast

For this business of living

Insists on its giving

Everything to the Past

© Janet Martin

Humility Becomes Us

Humility becomes us

Self-importance such a fraud

For we are really nothing but

The workmanship of God

Humility becomes us

What a waste of gifted grace

To struggle through a lifetime

Without giving God His place

Humility becomes us

Ah, what freedom as the chains

Of pride and pretense vanishes

And only God remains

Humility becomes us

When we understand our worth

Not by our boast but by our praise

To God of Heav’n and earth

Humility becomes us

As we fully recognize

The Authorship of every breath

And every sunrise 

Humility becomes us

Not by self-things we applaud

But by the honest wonderment

Of one true Holy God

©  Janet Martin

 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Phil. 2: 5-8