Of Daily Grace

Memory and desire kindle

Hope and heartache's bittersweet

Even as those sky-clocks swindle

Moments from beneath our feet

Still we search, within each season

For the best of daily grace

Lest we lose sight of the reason

We are here in the first place

Future-present-past mute-mingle

Truth its changeless law imparts

 Where Life’s best will never jingle

In our pockets, but our hearts

The weigh-scale of choice is fool-proof

Night-skies with day-rise align

Ever changing on the changeless

Rudiments of Time’s design

The foothold of fame is fragile

Happiness, no one can buy

Daily grace is free; a God-smile

To the likes of you and I

Oh, for eyes to see the beauty

Not in some strange far-off place

But within love’s call of duty

And God's gift of daily grace

© Janet Martin

So, yesterday when one of the little guys I babysit (schools closed due to extreme cold temps)told us he heard its going to be an early spring, that called for hot-chocolate Cheers!

...and never mind the meteorologist this morning warning us it could be May before we feel any real spring warmth! 

It's Winter

Last summer I wrote It's Summer. 


   

This morning I needed to dig for the silver-lining in this long cold-snap...because It's Winter

It’s winter and the world that curled like kittens at our feet

Is wrapped in satin ribbon; chiaroscuro unmarred

The trees that sighed with summer-song lie silent on the street

Where each outline is still-life like a blue and white postcard

The lays that lush and languid fell in corridors plush green

As sparked imagination strummed the sun-sweet afternoons

Are b-r-r-r-ittle, b-r-r-r-usque and b-r-r-r-umal; minuets steel-tongued and keen

Its dancers bundled thick against astringent, surly tunes

That bivouac once laden with petal-perfume of flow’rs

Is sparse; a barren thoroughfare save for the gale that broods

Before it breaks the vault that holds a sea of sequin stars

They tumble to the outstretched arms of hill, hollow and woods

…and on the slope that holds our hope of daisy-dappled joys

Or picnics on the quilt that sleeps in closet-quietness

The air is drenched with shrieks as sleds spill jolly girls and boys

Where winter is a wonderland of snow-white happiness

© Janet Martin

The Grand Reason of the Clock

 Sometimes the bold exchange of day and night, of green to gold to white, vexes and stuns us in its undeterred assent...

 I couldn't sleep for a while last night, which is quite unusual, but for some reason the head was full of what the heart could not subdue...until I folded it into prayer after prayer and left it there.

Sometimes the head is full of what the heart cannot subdue

Where naked past is juxtaposed with veiled and vague unknown

A moment wrestles in our grip before it fades into

A labyrinth of consequence and echoes set in stone

Sometimes we fight the dark and light that interchanges where

We are not ready yet to taste the haste of past’s off-spring

And grace, for all its goodness does not vindicate our care

Or absolve nature’s order of harvest after planting

Sometimes the bold exchange of day and night, of green to gold

To white, vexes and stuns us in its undeterred assent

While words appeal, Time’s ether reel seals pictures in its hold

And will not return for undoing, one single moment

Sometimes we overlook the awesome charge of tick and tock

…the lowering of heaven and the rising of its sea

Can camouflage with seasons The Grand Reason of The Clock

Unlocking stepping-stones that lead to Immortality

© Janet Martin

Acts 17:24-31

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

“Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”

Here and Now

 ...seems we are always somewhat caught between holding on and letting go...

What was, we cannot change

What will be who can know?

The only thing we have and hold

Is this; the here and now

The here and now soon slips

Away, yet never does

A panoramic promenade

As is becomes what was

And in our looking back

We learn anew somehow

That all we ever really have

Is this; the here and now

Thus, because here and now

Is deftly interlaced

With what has passed and what will be

We have no time to waste

© Janet Martin

Winter is a Little Time of Life

  

  

  

So, just in case we've forgotten...

The shawl that drapes white- soft on scraggly limb,

And lends its cape to cover field and hill

And locks the valley streams that lilt and brim

With silver song, beneath ice-soldered will

…the gale that wails across pale countryside

And roars, blue-lipped through brittle barrenness

Or lunges at each door and tries to find

Its way into our bones with brute caress

…the corpse-like timberland, where stiffly starched

Attendants observe, sergeant-steely-stern

Our creaking, squeaking footsteps bravely marched

Toward the hearth where dreams and fires burn

…the hunger for color and corridors

Alive with birdsong, where the air is rife

With everything that long we waited for

…is really but a little time of life

© Janet Martin

Hubby delivered cattle to a cheery, lithe-stepped farmer this morning. In a mischievous effort to derail this far-too-happy-for-a-raw-winter-morning farmer, hubby remarked about’ this too long too cold winter’ and Farmer quickly replied that “this cold is really but a little time of life when you stop to think about it, plus it is so good for the earth to rest in deep-freeze. We have snow blowers to move the snow. It’s not so bad”