To Summer's Guests

Be your own guest. where life’s best, summer-living

Is giving grand reasons to get out of bed

Come; take an hour to get reacquainted

With friendly-faced flowers, gold, purple, pink, red

Take a lake-break where its lay laps the skyline

For soon gales will lash silver stars to white froth

Be your own guest; rest a bit between pages

Study the fine fretwork of green-whispered cloth

Love, joy and peace is a garden in August

Bursting with bloom after warring with weeds

Fruit laden baskets, still-life masterpieces

Butterflies bobbing over thickets and reeds

Work with awareness of what waits, my darling

Spend time, not money where summer spills free

Linger where cricket-song serenades gardens

Do three-hour picnics beneath an old tree

Love while life grants you the dance of a season

Joy is far more than a three-letter word

It sings in flowers where peace paints a picture

That fills summer’s framework with tincture soon blurred

© Janet Martin

Poetic Blooms has swung wide the garden gate once more...

Wanna join? Free to poets of all ages and stages!

this is written for the prompt; 

Let There Be Peace and Love and Joy

Awe-gust...

Its wind is a fellow, mellow and footloose

Its footpath is yellow with stubble and dust

Its limb like a cello, chestnut and chartreuse

Rousing in poem-primed pens, wanderlust

Its ‘doth’ spread on cloth of Queen Ann’s lace and clover

Of Moth-wing staccato on screens after dark

Where dusk’s peach-plum curtain shrouds earth like a lover

Gathering his most-beloved to his heart

Its salver is set with salty-sweet surprises

Its poplar tress quivers on rivers moon-beamed

Where ebb and flow sea-song, red sunsets and rises

Create paradises, half-held, half-dreamed

Its Want fulfilled in guilt-free celebration

Of wandering where gardens laugh like a child

Happiness spills a sky-wide invitation

Blue touching down where sunflowers run wild   

August is like living inside a poem

Cricket-choirs lure us outside Duty’s gate

Crushed chamomile teases nostrils where roaming

Takes us from tasks that will just have to wait

This is the hand filled with Time’s grandest torment

A friendly forever that flowers and wings

After the purple and gold of the moment

Into the fabric of soft-echoed strings

This is the landscape of wildflowers tattered

Where soon summer starts to surrender her crown

August arousal all tousled and scattered

Its glory-days gone like glint of thistledown

© Janet Martin

Because We Are Our Brother's Keeper...

 

Whether walking where the water washes sand-prints away,

Whether sprawled in a chair or bed-ridden,

Whether wearing flip-flops or The Original Muck

We leave footprints never fully hidden

 ***
 Lest the blood/mud of another's downfall stains our hands, 

we should think before we drink!

 ***

Every alcoholic started with 'one harmless drink'

 ***

"Just because I can control myself after one drink doesn't mean that someone watching can. 

Imagine if  the word 'no' when offered a drink saves someone else from a life of addiction 

and all the awfulness attached!

No amount of momentary pleasure is worth opening the door to another's lifetime of heartache!" 

~My dad~

***

"I like it!" said Eve and gave some to Adam...and he liked it too!

Good-bye Eden!

***

But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, 

and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way.

Daniel 1:8

***

We might think it won’t matter, once

Just a quick slip from the path

To taste a sip from  'Sly One's Sconce’

But oh…the aftermath

cause  someone tells someone who tells

Someone who tells one who

Thinks if 'we' did then he/she would like

To try it ‘just once’ too

He finds he likes the taste so well

He has two, three and four…

And now Desire burns like hell

With a thirst he can’t ignore

…and now the one who tried it once

Unscathed, watches one cursed

Glass after glass, he drinks and drinks

But cannot quench his thirst

© Janet Martin

 Below, a few excerpts from

James MacDonald;

Walk in the Word Message entitled

Wise up About Alcohol

The Bible does not require total abstinence,

but it recommends it as the highest and best course, filled with the greatest wisdom.
I believe it is a choice which you can be most proud of when you stand before the Lord Jesus Christ.

... It is a loving choice. As you grow in your faith, you discern that you make choices
 not because of what is best for you, but by what is best for others.
The Christian life is not all about you—what you can handle,
what you can control, what’s nice for you.
The Christian life is for others.  We don’t live to ourselves.

... As a follower of Jesus, if you’re not sure it’s right for you to drink alcohol,
then it’s wrong for you to do it even if it isn’t wrong....

There is nothing more devastating than a life (SO much potential!) destroyed by addiction!

Of Intangible Imprints

It's peach and blueberry season. yay(two of my all-time food favs!)

 But even with peaches and blueberries we need to practice moderation 

(unless we enjoy an old-fashioned stomach-ache...believe me. I know this to be true!😏)

Since My Scare a few weeks ago I have not touched cold cereal but returned to

the safety of oatmeal 'mush' with fresh fruit, ground flax seed and a drizzle of maple-syrup!

YUM!!!

Press well your barefoot paperweight

On pages printed with soon-past

Where morning flings ajar its gate

And ushers in the ‘break of fast’

Where peaches drip and blossoms slip

From buds that cannot clench the wreath

Hoisted to bloom a little bit

Before it strews the dust beneath

Where what we hold is like a flow’r

Soon kissing pages dripped with peach

As the impressions of an hour

Scatter imprints beyond our reach

© Janet Martin

Coming to Grips...with the Thought of Today

...that's what it felt like this morning; SO many reasons to be glad...and sad.

Thought both a weapon and a shield, therefore

foolish to charge forth until we kneel

and commit today to He who will lead the way if we let Him!

yes, even through thorn-pricks of consequence when we were not 

'quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry'...

the first verse in our Sunday morning message. 

James 1:19-27

Now splays across dew-dressed newness of day

Visions that looking forward will contrive

Thought reaches to imminent come-what-may

For reasons to be glad to be alive

The cricket croons, the swallows dart and dive

In tune with He who has the final say

The golds and grays of high and lows enmesh

Ah, yesterdays and morrows none can clench

Where joy and sorrow-climaxes of flesh

Induce a thirst that no world-well will quench

…and we of rebel-nature cannot wrench

From Mercy’s mysteries, want’s willful ‘yes’

Ah, consequence of action slips our mind

If impulse wins before we test its yield

The nugget of an instant, harvest lined

Like seeds, so small until they fill a field

Where what we plant in time will be revealed

To edify and humble humankind

…now splays across the loss and gain of days

Fresh ways to learn to discern love from lust

Thought reaches but cannot predict the ways

Of God; not ours to know but simply trust

Where crickets croon and swallows skim the dust

In tune with He who tips Time’s seasoned trays

© Janet Martin

 For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he...

Prov.23:7