Time's Maternal Touch

We come to expect and find comfort in the sameness of season-traits in an ever-changing world...

With kind, maternal ease Time tucks the earth

‘Neath leafless trees; with mem’ries slumber-kissed

She draws a star-spun quilt across a girth

Where centuries dissolve like morning mist

Despite its tides of change, Time’s changeless way

Keeps with sound comfort, a world otherwise strange

We, on the breadth of history’s cold clay

Become familiar with the exchange

…of seasons; from the window-scape of years

We peer and welcome home like family

Its sameness that our hungry thought reveres

Where nothing is quite like it used to be

Moments moil forth, toil, mirth like roiling seas

Winnow with steady ease, prizes we clutch

While we turn eyes toward skeletal trees

Clawing the skies ‘neath Time’s maternal touch

© Janet Martin

Happiness Is Not Like Socks...

Happiness is not a toy

That soon loses its first joy

Happiness is not like socks

We can’t fit it in a box

Happiness is not a Steal

Lure of sale-sticker appeal

We don’t pick its shape or size

By the color of its eyes

We can’t wrap it up, oh no

Nor garnish it with a bow

We won’t find it on store-shelves

We can’t buy it for ourselves

Happiness is not like Stuff

Packed inside a box of fluff

It is a strange paradox

Not like balls or blocks or socks

Happiness is a free prize

If... 

we learn where it’s secret lies
For...

We can not keep it and yet

The more we give the more we get

© Janet Martin

Then I Remember Who God IS...

 

When fear would rival to endear its coldness in my breast

Then I remember who God IS; He lays my fears to rest

  

For He who holds earth’s elements and unfolds heaven’s scrim

Can never be usurped; demons flee at the thought of Him

Oh God, our God, who clothes the heath; beneath Thy tender care

Though armies of rebellion seethe, yet we will not despair

You shake the lake with thunder and strake galaxies with stars

You wake a holy hunger as we wonder Who You are

Who tends un-uttered groaning; lavishes this blue-dot globe

And bends from darkness morning light with fragments of Your robe

Oh God, our God, You walk upon a scaffolding of air

Above, beneath, without, within, Your Presence, God, is there

Then, should fear rival to endear its nearness in my thought

What peace to know that You are here to intercede, oh God

© Janet Martin

 O Lord my God, You are very great:
You are clothed with honor and majesty,

Ps. 104:1 

(to be re-reminded of Who God is,
follow this link)

Maybe It Is The Color of the Quietness of Dark...

Maybe it is the color of the quietness of dark

It fills in all the spaces leaving naught but thought to think

A wanderer that needs no shoes; a balladeer of hearts

A hunter ever scaling heights to wrestle into ink

Maybe it is the miles that disappear beneath the tread

As retrospect and prospect vie for precedence full-force

And isn’t it uncanny, all the roads inside a head?

Where thought is a lone rider on a brave, gossamer horse

Maybe it is the kiss of all we miss that keens the will

Of quill unqualified in matters never set to word

Yet, when the lea turns ebony and everything is still

Thought ravages its passages with intent undeterred

Maybe it is the way that worlds, familiar by day

Are washed from every window as the landscape disappears

Yet unveils behind thought-wide eyes an uncharted highway  

Where horse and rider traverse and reimburse fallen tears

© Janet Martin

Open Wide and Say A-a-a-h

Ah, what a lot of lovely spheres of yesterdays we had

To contemplate the gait of moments drives one nearly mad

My, my, how subtle the exchange of ways once commonplace

As fingers are estranged from faces lost to time’s embrace

And mindset must adapt to learn to yearn in quiescent muse

While daily dusk returns to collect hindsight’s latest views

Ah,Time trolls mist-kissed maples, strolls the red-brick boulevard

It paints the stilly twilight like a master-piece postcard

Where whispers that teased tresses green and gold by day of May

Run quieter caresses across outlines silver-gray

As thought strains and delves deeper into frays of fading tint

Ere midnight flicks Today away like a stray bit of lint

 

Ah, 'neath the hierarchy of tick-tock lifetimes disappear

And there is no annulment for moments once spent, my dear

Where past is nothing but Present poured into Bygone's mold

How beautiful and brief its blessed fortune that we hold

While learning to adapt to What Is after What Once Was

Before What Will Be fills our fingers with life’s latest cause

© Janet Martin

 I don't really want to say this but I will, 

'Can you believe another year is almost gone?!