Showing posts with label Gerard Manley Hopkins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gerard Manley Hopkins. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

Dear May, a Farewell Love-letter

 Happy last Day of May!








Dear May, somehow you always exceed eager expectation
As you begin to nurture nature’s treed rejuvenation
As gardens start to thrill our gaze with petal-punctuation
And overhead a minstrel plays leaf-lays in celebration

Dear May, you always rouse anew, rekindled planting pleasure
As you run wooing whispers through buds bursting with bloom treasure
As you, beneath young and old feet, unfurl your finest measure
Where beauty and duty compete with lures of toil and leisure

Dear May, the way you always spill with April’s remnant showers
Makes worth the while it takes until you reward faith with flowers
Tulip chalices, bleeding hearts, allium, lilac-bowers
Always, your floral drumroll kickstarts summer’s fleeting hours

Dear May, your dust is sacred, stirred by farmer’s urgent labor
Your prudent lease sublimely blurred by your lime-coloured saber
Waving a welkin wand that welcomes home the long-lost neighbor
As nests are built and filled with featherdown and fledgling caper

Dear May, it always feels as if you leave us way too soon-oh
Medley of march-and-meander through days, dandeli’n-strewn-oh
We could not bear the fare-thee-well of your sweet afternoon-oh
But for the tolling of a bell that always brings us June-oh

© Janet Martin









Saturday, October 13, 2018

Not At The Mercy of Moods


Life's 'Stuff' can crush with emptiness
We all need God to guard our thought
From dungeons of depravity

Yesterday in Judy's latest post entitled Leaks
 I laughed out loud as I read this; Don't 'Should' on yourself!
Thought can make us do that all the time! huh?
This morning Thought threatened to throw its Thrall over 
All There Is To Be Thankful For...




So, in case of despair
I fled to the Throne-room of Prayer!


Moods make us brood while woods and hills spill elemental art
Fond dreams, for all their fuel cannot fill Want’s gaping void
Seasons, like snowflakes fall and melt in pictures to the heart
Kindling a tender duel twixt love torn and over-joyed

We all need God; thought turns on us like storms on listing ships
It leads into temptations to wallow in doubt and fear
Its woulda-shoulda-coulda steals the laughter from our lips
A monster’s roar beneath placid facade of skin, my dear

How quick thought is to deviate from pious Best Intent
Adept Inventor of wars waged twixt Hope and deep despair
Where no one is immune to shrewd impulses Mortal Bent
And none but God can meets us in the Grand Throne Room of prayer

Life’s burdens would be like a millstone hung about the neck
Where Emptiness can drown the Downcast in its plumb-less pit  
We all need God to keep Thought’s Very Wily Will in check
We all need God; So Love can keep Thought’s Fragile Beacon lit

© Janet Martin




Search me, O God, and know my heart; 
Try me and know my anxious thoughts;

Saturday, September 12, 2015

Forward...

God opens dawn's door with holy fire to our Forward-facing flight...

When reflecting on life I am so thankful we cannot return, (even if there are times and places we miss)
we only, always move forward, living not in what will be or what was, but What Is!
I hope your Saturday and weekend grants awareness of God's Grandeur...
Blessings:) 

(I have a few teen-age male 'bakers' about to take over my kitchen for a while. I better ske-daddle!
They are participating in a Men's Dessert Challenge our church is hosting tonight as part of our fall kick-off celebrations.)


The waking hour broods above
Time's over, gone-and-done
Its carriage primed to carry us
Forward. None can return
To grovel or gloat in what was
This forward-facing flight
 Adheres to Eden's changeless laws
Of morning, noon and night

 Come, all aboard and on and up
Time's one-way thoroughfare
Proceeds from Mercy's lenient cup
And who of us will dare
To challenge He who ordains it?
And who is left behind?
Not one. Life's forward-faced frigate
Cuts virgin swathes through Time 

 ...where all that we have said and done
Is scattered in its wake
This Chariot of Fire, love
Denudes with Past, our Take
And none can erase or replace
One moment-drop. A flood 
From lips and finger-tips; thus grace
 Moves forward. God is good

Janet Martin~

God's grandeur of grace moves us forward with holy, holy, holy...awe!

Here is the poem from the photo above...

God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

June




Let the wind waft in soft kisses
Let the sea-song wash our toes
Though green pastureland embraces
North-south-east-west ebb-and-flows

Let the aftermath of flowers
Tease the air with pungent blush
While the artist tints yon-bowers
With a silver-turquoise brush

Let the meadow brim with clover
Let the morning sing for joy
Let the loom of bloom spill over
Filling fists of girl and boy

Let the blue and golden glimmer
Of a slow-churned afternoon
Be the first sweet sip of summer
Let me call its free-fall June

© Janet Martin


...and sharing a poem I found in one of my books today that I love, love, LOVE! mortality and immortality juxtaposed


That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

 
 
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark
                            Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
                            Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:
                            In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
                            Is immortal diamond.