Life Is a Journey

Let it take us by the hand

Lead us like a lover, keen

Into Today’s foreign land

Where no one has ever been

Or seen what waits to unfold

Will it be gray, green or gold?

Let it fortify our feet

Life is a journey, oh yes,

Bitter mingles with the sweet

Heartache hallows happiness

Trust in He who frees dawn’s gate

He will make our pathways straight

Let it heal our heart’s deep hurt

Fill the hunger in its core

Not with prizes drawn from dirt

But through He Who we live for

Hallelujah, hearts applaud

Life is a journey to God

Hand-foot-heart, this skin-bone cage

Harbors want, fear, hope and need

Unknown spreads its morning stage

Take God’s Hand and let Him lead

For He knows and sees the way

Honor Him with trust today

© Janet Martin

Today my friend Diane has her third chemo treatment before tests tomorrow to see what is happening. Will you pray for God's peace to calm her and Steve, her husband?

Will you pray for trust when God's ways are not our ways?

 Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.

Prov.3:5-6

Summer's Serenaders

 I heard my first cricket of this summer yesterday morning as we drove past this fence-row of wildflowers when we were leaving the cottage...

The crickets have begun earth’s summer-song

Their serenade stipples night’s dewy deep

And wafts up to the space where stars are hung

And lures the poet from her place of sleep

To wonder at the strange staccato thrum

Their nocturne fills the air with vibrato

Where musky dark is like a stadium

That veils the choir yet hails us to a show

That bids us let its cadences pervade

Staid skin and bone until the heart of hearts

Partakes of this anointed serenade

And the sweet summer-sadness it imparts

© Janet Martin

The dark is not yet drenched with cricket-song, but softly stippled with the prelude to late-summer's crescendo.

Ebb and Flow...

It plays its ways

To a new generation

Unseen as the wind,

It leaves its mark

Time is a tide;

A seamless succession

Of birth and death

And light and dark

…it splays in days;

Tips trays of wonder

Green-kissed frost

And mauve-mist dale

Seasons salted

With swift splendor

Gift to earth

From heaven’s grail

…always waking,

Taking, leaving

Laughter, grief;

Time’s ebb and flow

Courses; forces

Through our being

An eternal

Letting go

© Janet Martin

This is another Matter of Time poem. 

After going to the same cottage for vacation year after year,

sitting at the end of the same dock year after year, 

becoming keenly aware of how much changes year after year,

in spite of what remains the same year after year,

the matter of time can take the idle, summer-sunset-intoxicated mind on quite a stroll!

On The Matter of Time...

Time sculpts its youth into each dawn

It scatters stars on late-day lakes

And like a raven, perches on

The pinnacle of midnight’s gates

Time; what we make of it, my dear

Is what our legacy will be

It pulses with laughter and tear

Sustaining waning filigree

Time; what an awesome little Thing

A subtle sampling of its air

Where carefree youth soon feels its sting

And dons its albatross of care

Time; changeless beneath garb of change

A breath into the lungs and then

Death, dark with its Untold Exchange

Returns us back to God again

© Janet Martin

Twilight Traffic

Traffic slows

Its lulled rush flows through

Dusk’s mulled yellows

Hellos and farewell

Rise and fall like the swell of the sea

As it meets the sky

Summer is a sigh

Exhaled where colors

Of daylight die

© Janet Martin

Back from a week at the cottage:)

Every night this beach is lined with people waiting to see the sky-show!
Nobody on earth can draw an audience like God in Heaven!