Discovery makes new the ancient; what a life is time
Like a moss-covered milestone on which eager children climb
Clueless at how far hours reach; or what its gate unbars
We, fresh-faced foreigners, stumble-tumble toward the stars
And earn the song that yester’s young-at-heart learned
through Time’s strife
Singing like they, the blue and gray of oh, oh, what a life
The take-and-make of moments is a sacred bread to break
Its crumbs of living scatter pink across dusk’s fired lake
Rhapsody and soliloquy, ballad, sonnet and prose
Unfolds in new-old poetry like fathoms of a rose
And because we are learning often we forget to look
Until its petals are pressed between pages in Past's book
Time’s tapestry of touch and taste haste’s blue through us;
the grass
Once green is brown and brittle where the little hours pass
Like shadows first before us then behind us; solitude
Is often-times the playground for life’s teeming echo-brood
...where we, tongue-tired beam and dream dreams, rosy-cheeked and rife
Still singing on time’s way its melody; oh, what a life
The eyes of true love, darling, never utter condemnation
But buoy our want and will toward time’s obligation
And we would all be crying without cause for joy, but oh
Oh, what a life; the knife that wields in winds that brutal
blow
Melts in the hand of Time’s forgiveness; winter turns to
spring
Oh, what a life; oh, what a song Time's children learn to sing
© Janet Martin
