Understanding April

 After warm gold last week

 we're back to gray cold this week,

 but what we have is never all there is...

Drape your cape of gray around me

Something akin to violin lilt

Rides the breeze and ruffles the trees

Rousing the seamstress of green-thread gilt

Weigh the day in April showers

Purpose often does not tell its span

But lends tincture to the picture

Pressed kindly into God’s bigger plan

Laugh your autograph in raindrops

Trip across the dripping afternoon

For I can sense more than pretense

Wafting flower-laden in yon boon

© Janet Martin

Morning-view

Love will ever be the conqueror; never hate. Oh, if Hate could only see the Gate that opens as time's door closes...praying for suffering, sorrowing, fleeing survivors! God is faithful.

Star-sugared awning fades in the new dawning

Of who-knows-what-waits to-fill-it, but God

Mercy immerses where darkness disperses

In virgin Morning adorning sky-sod

Gold, pink and purple halos earth’s dust-circle

Waiting to suffer what only God knows

Still He is faithful in spite of sin’s awful

Lawless allowances trampling the Rose

We cannot see the whole story, God’s glory

Trails in the Heaven’s and wails in our tears

Into His keeping time’s hours are weeping

Morning soft-crowning what soon disappears

© Janet Martin

Praying for those poor, homeless, sorrowing survivors here

Praying for my neighbor Arnold and his family in his on going health-battle. (will you pray too?)

Praying for believers that we can remain faithful to the end, no matter where in the world we are!

What Are You, Gold-Gray-Blue?

Write a “what you are” poem, or…

Write a “what you are not” poem. 

PAD Challenge day 21 is a two-for-two Tues.

Walk, stroll, dash, loll

Hurry-scurry, amble

Life is more than dust-cajole

In a soul-shod scramble

Sit, stand, heed, command

Lead-and-follow mingling

Time is more than ether sand

Poured through thought and feeling

Eat, drink, swim, sink

War of More imploring

Soon the noon of it lies pink

On earth's west-brink shoring

Wake, sleep, toss, keep

Dark and daylight duel

In the heap-o-living, love

Here and there a jewel

You are not some futile jot

Dashed upon Time's pages

Nor a soon forgotten dot

Lost among the ages

 

Hope, pray, for today

With its trial-error

Is God's gifted blue-gold-gray

Leading to Forever

Janet Martin

Our Eternal Dwelling
…9Therefore we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him. 10For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. 2 Cor.5:10

Wake, sleep, toss, keep

Dark and daylight duel

In the heap-o-living, love

Here and there a jewel

Lonely April Wind

 For a brief bit the sun high-lighted 'almost evening' before clouds scuttled over its attempts at warmth

The latticework of limb lies on day’s welkin winnowing

The air assumes the color of good-bye in every sigh

The back-drop of a rainy April ‘almost evening’

Tugs hard upon the heart-string like an echoed lullaby

   

Silence runs fingers over thought like Want without a name

Darkness is more than light’s denial where the daylight fell

Longing is not a person; no one can quite quell its flame

And rain in middle April after dusk ignites its swell

The wind moans, blue and hungry like a beggar at my door

A wail akin to November when it was hungry too

The fellowship of night-farers and sleepless troubadours

Vexes the face that watches from yon windows swaddled view

The lamplighter that wanders out among the stars is late

The dark enhanced by absent spark in heaven’s emptiness

The April night is weeping for a friendlier soul-mate

But all that it can find is the wind and its loneliness

© Janet Martin

Day's Sweater Is Shrinking, I'm Thinking...

 Could we have a heavy raincoat with the sweater, please?! It's cold, soggy stitching on time's loom today...

I struggle into the sleeves of a new you

Tell me, 

Are you shrinking?

For 

it seems to me you come to

Your end while I'm still busy thinking

And long before I am wont to undress

And 

let you be part of Past’s nothingness

There is always a little too little of you

Or 

do I rebel at your constraint

As 

Wanderlust weighs against my to-do

lists, 

Gratefulness exceeds my complaint

For lo, here you are tickling sleep from my skin

Tugging at my arm to begin again

© Janet Martin

My Little Place of Wonder, The Twinkle of time

PAD Challenge day 20: For today’s prompt, take the phrase “My (blank), the (blank),” replace the blanks with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. 

On Earth's space of Time I have been ordained a little place

of wonder at what passes and wondering what is next

In this pretext of largeness is the smallness I embrace

My life; my little place among The Many often vexed

as I, by unpredictability adeptly clothed 

In Ordinary Everyday; who knows what will occur

Before the light of day is snuffed; its offering betrothed

to What-Has-Been; life-changing footfalls soon a still-life blur

On Bygone's panorama and nobody is immune

To that which, looking back is like a surreal pantomime

Yet I am dearly grateful for each faded afternoon

...my little place of wonder in the Big Twinkle of Time

I wonder, as I wonder at the grace that let it be

How soon My Little Place of Wonder will be history

...and then I wonder, as I wonder at the smallness of it all

If I have left Something of worth on earth in my footfall

In this Pasture of Time my place is quite a little room

Yet, there will never be another me among its bloom

Janet Martin

...and the irony as I wrote of unpredictability;
a phone call to let me know that the little guy I babysit
will not be coming today

While Watching the Stream Flow Forward...

 Tonight we were out to celebrate my sister-in-law's fortieth birthday...(remember when we thought 40 was old?!;-). My youngest sister remarked to me that she can't imagine one of her boys living far away(I mentioned that Melissa will likely stay in Toronto for the summer because she pays rent whether she is there or not) and I suddenly tasted the full flavor that time insists on seasoning our years with...letting go again and again.

Eventually it becomes a way of life

…this yielding to the forward flow

Of hold-let-go-I-miss-you-so

Where love’s long reach is raw and rife

…with memories when times like these

Were still fear and far, far away

Before the breadth of yesterday

Snared years breath-soft as midnight’s breeze

…and we remember how it was

When we were glad that we could speak

'I love you' close against the cheek

Of those we held and dearly loved

Knowing Time, bent on moment-strife

Opens and closes doors with haste

...we grow accustomed to the taste

That has become a way of life

© Janet Martin