Showing posts with label crickets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crickets. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

I Heard My First Cricket of Summer Today...


 Cricket-stages waiting to be filled with invisible minstrels...



I heard my first cricket of summer today
And it made me a little sad
For these are the minstrels that chirp-chirp away
The beautiful summer we had

I heard the first cricket of summer today
It tugged at my heart with its call
Knowing its rhythmic backdrop will play
Until the frost-chill of the fall

I heard my first cricket of summer today
Plaintive soloist, but not long
For soon a whole hidden cricket choir will play
August and September’s earth-song

Aha, close your eyes; can't you feel the skies lower
Balladeer rousing both teardrop and grin 
 Drawing its bow over heart-strings and clover
Velvet vibrato from a black violin

I heard my first cricket of summer today
And it made me both sad and glad
To know that the crickets did not lose their way
And will play till ‘the summer we had’

© Janet Martin


Tuesday, September 13, 2016

September Serenade


Sometimes it pains us as we see time’s dauntless intervention
September wears a crown of brown and gold with hints of rust
We climb aboard mist-morning barge knowing its sure direction
To moor upon a purple sea of twilight-tinted dust


Steadfast, this ‘bearing witness of’ time's command, unrelenting
September shares its apples like anthems of sun-kissed spoil
And teaches us life-lessons about the payoff of planting
Of harvest-revelations and of fruit after long toil

 
(September dares to win us with cricket-song stippled days...)

We brave the wave that settles on the grave of time’s undoing
September dares to win us with cricket-song stippled days
While we enjoy and mourn life’s ever-yielding yet pursuing
The Alpha and Omega of love’s common-creature ways


The board-walk at the beach is bare; the air wears pale gray-yellow
September stirs the inner-us to slow our footsteps, oh,
While wood and garden tune the strings of nature’s wooing cello
A serenade to summer and life’s constant letting go

© Janet Martin


Saturday, September 3, 2016

Summer Run Wild...or When Crickets Sing






When crickets sing we know Time’s wing
Is heavy with impending frost
And suddenly we hear the sound-
Less sound of life’s sure-footed cost
Where all we have and hold is rolled
Into the cold of letting go
Heat-rippled dust and wanderlust
Becomes the toll beneath the snow

When crickets sing heart-hollows ring
With echoes of summer nigh-spent
And senses, numb to living’s sum
Are keened to loving’s discontent
The harbor where summer laid bare
Her laughter, lilting gold and blue
Is gray and tossed with hours lost
On some far star-struck avenue

When crickets sing summer is king
But only for a little while
Its burnished jade cannot dissuade
The hand where Grand Farewells beguile
Past garden plot our meager thought
Rambles like a barefooted child
Through dusk’s so-long to find the throng
That serenades summer run wild

© Janet Martin

Anywhere, anytime, this time of year cricket-minstrels entertain 24-7 !!

Sunday, July 24, 2016

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.

Monday, August 11, 2014

Cricket-canticle





One night I heard it start
A prelude, faint and far
Of lone minstrel strumming the dark
Beneath the evening star
But now, the passageway
Of summer into fall
Is serenaded by a lay
Of cricket-canticle

Beneath leaf-laden vine
And petal-portico
These weary-less songsters incline
Our thoughts to letting go
The heart’s reluctant urge
Cannot restrain the clock
Is it a madrigal or dirge
That fills the garden-walk?

An hour seems discrete
And insignificant
Yet slows the scamper in child-feet
Where seasons ever chant
…one night I heard it start
Where now the air is full
Of Time’s betrothal to the heart  
And cricket-canticle

© Janet Martin