Showing posts with label OctPoWriMo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OctPoWriMo. Show all posts

Friday, October 30, 2015

Ode To October...


October's Swansong Begins... 

OctPoWriMo day 30; sensitivity

Oh, sanguine charmer of the eye
You tease summer from trees and hills
With glades of gold, with scarlet ply
Extravagant, your palette spills
To fill the world with butterflies
A heaven-on-earth-paradise
Persimmon-rose-bronze-blended prize
A sacred dread instills

Oh, bold enticer of the heart
You draw worship from every ‘ah’
And with each brush-stroke you impart
To atheistic-boast, pure awe
At the authority of He
Who paints Earth’s panoramic lea
With autographs of majesty
In nature’s supreme law

Oh, seasoned spender of our sighs
Oh, tender troubadour of trees
Your leaf-and-lonely-limb good-byes
Ignite love’s soul-sweet agonies
In pumpkins, kissed with crumbled mist
In frosted flasks where you untwist
Morning, poured in silk amethyst
You have no enemies

Oh, author of apprenticeship
You gild then strip the supple clime
While in the orchard branches drip
Ruddy swansongs in apple-chime 
The nectar of hope's harvest pressed
And caught in cups of sparkling zest 
Where scholars holy-humbly blessed
Savor sun-flavored Time

Oh, keeper of our sorrow-storms
Love’s holding close and letting go
Is a keen winnowing as arms
Learn the lordship of seasons, oh
And like relinquishment of leaves
Of flowers spent and garnered sheaves
Gratitude swells while thought soft-grieves
October’s golden snow

© Janet Martin

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Caught in the Middle




OctPoWriMo: Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. ~Seneca


Past’s Ever-after births Before; the door after The End
Where closing one opens another; this is life, my friend
For Ending is beginning; nothing stays the same for long
Like grief; a revelation after laughter ends its song

The hue of morning-mercy opens the Gate of New Day
The blue of twilight closes it and brushes it away
Its circuit of survival a relentless Enterprise
Of moment-metered little life-and-deaths conceiving sighs

Darling, we met as strangers; once there was a Before You
And I was unaware of all there was I never knew
But Now I know there’ll never be an after void of this;
The Lorelei of Loving and the echo of its bliss

We are always in the middle of Time’s after and before
The End and The Beginning, a wraith-like rotating door
Where we can never fully tell if we are near or far
To the end or beginning of exactly where we are

Time wields an invitation that nobody can resist
We yield to its persuasion like a lover to a kiss
Where everything is a fine intermingling Mystic More
Of Now, after the After and yet always The Before


© Janet Martin


Sunday, October 18, 2015

Discovery is Like a Rose...




OctPoWriMo day 18: Things are not always what they seem...

Discovery is like a rose
That breaks the binding of its bud
The light of understanding flows
Through barriers as thick as mud
Then, caught upon a minute trance
Wonder and insight interpose
Defying nettled ignorance
…discovery is like a rose

The eye is but a thoroughfare
Sight is not withheld from the blind
While many look but merely stare
Perception is the sight of mind
Discovery is like its rose
Philistinism, like a tomb
Before cognizance grips the throes
That probes the bud with light, then bloom

Will we believe deception’s lies
Where vision gapes with vanity
And forfeit the mark of the prize
Because we did not learn to see?
Oh, pray we do more than suppose
Or point with blank and wide-eyed stare
Discovery is like a rose
Waiting for us to find God there

© Janet Martin

 Lines in photo from William Blake's poem Auguries of Innocence

Friday, October 16, 2015

A One-of-a-Kind Cloak



 "We are who we are because of the people we've known and the experiences of life"
this is loosely quoted from the book of a study I am in;



We wear cloaks woven with time's threads
Of where we’ve been and who we’ve known
Experience and habit spreads
Across the skin and through the bone

We’ve borne the prick of tender fears
While the Seamstress measured and stitched
Designing patterns with our tears
And laughter, like a hand bewitched

We are at the the mercy of Love
Not fate, as sometimes we suppose
From fathoms beneath and above
The measure of each raiment flows

This dressing-room of gray and gold
Is like a loom; we cannot clutch
Its gossamer, as have-and-hold
Runs phantom fabric through our touch

Then, as the Seamstress tweaks and snips
She shapes a garment all our own
Where the cloak a lifetime slips
Across the skin and through the bone


© Janet Martin

No Paradelle as the OctPoWriMo prompt 16 suggested but still, a poem.