Grail of Grateful Gladness

 It's a drippy morning, but stunning still!

Color cascades, gray-blue-yellow

Over heaven’s wall

Morning, like a jocund fellow

Metes time’s madrigal

Gifts too manifold to mention

Pour from grace-gilt grail

Summer’s streams in green redemption

Over hill and vale

Slow thy hurried wish and worry

Lest thou skimmest bow’rs

Where man’s Maker, rich in mercy

Mentors us with flow’rs

Touch Time’s yoke of season-splendour

With love’s humble awe

For its tokens, swift and tender

Yield to nature’s law

‘Faith is substance of things hoped for’

Not Want’s futile sigh

June attunes the heart to wonder

At God’s kind reply

© Janet Martin

Oft Upon Soft Death of Day...

How oft upon soft death of day

We scan the fading fell

Of motifs pinkly borne away

On twilight’s hill and dell

And oft, the hour, doffed of light

Seems gentler in near dark

Where dirge of day and birth of night

Pastoral leas embark

The heart is like a sailor, oh,

On seas that surge within

A monumental ebb and flow

Beneath frail veil of skin

Where oft upon soft death of day

The undertow of years

Can move thought’s bark through darkling splay

To spill salt fray in tears

How uncommon this common path

That none yet all have tread

To stand on tinseled aftermath

Of light with lowered head

Where coral-purple choirs play

An intangible hymn

As oft upon soft death of day

We sense Time growing dim

The more and less of life and love

Runs through the hour at hand

Where we are at the mercy of

Something or Someone grand

Where oft upon Soft Death of Day

We hear without a sound

The tiptoe of Untrodden Way

Weave harbors underground

© Janet Martin

We never know what a day will bring! 

Thoughts and prayers with those in Portugal

where wildfires claim many lives.

Subtle Undoing

 ...and so it goes; baby grows! Grandson Brantley is entering the world of...FOOD!!! such fun:)

Subtle undoing of skylines and stars

Spars with pursuit and its dream

Circumstance siphons from infinite jars

Heart and soul’s earnest esteem

Fragile, the flower that blooms on the air

Tugging time’s bower twixt hope and despair

Unknowns unravel and leave in their wake

Fragments of what used to be

Darling, the gavel of life’s give and take

Falls with velocity

Who can undo what runs through to and from?

Tenacious, vexing, ubiquitous sum

Onyx annulment of middle-night wanes

Filling our visage with gold

Past, like a fasting beast on the east feigns

Fortune; it slips from our hold

Anguish and awe in raw fullness allies

With the undoing of dawn’s wooing skies

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, mouth’s sweet-simple joy

My, what a blessed bunch are we

Life lends us laughter with wee girl and boy

Home houses its family

When and where spills its allotment; we drink

Chins dripping with time’s invisible ink

Incessant circuit of morn, noon and night

Moves through yon, blue vestibule

Labyrinth woven with grief and delight

Shards of steel, whispers of tulle

What but God’s love, can comfort twilight’s toll

Subtle undoing of all but the soul

© Janet Martin