Thursday, October 29, 2015

Of Bard Bereft...





We watch while the wind dismantles the world
With leaves and weaves within its revelries
A panoramic emptiness unfurled
In a riot of quietening trees
Where ethereal ellipses rush, then hush
A-bye, a lilied labyrinth of sighs
Melding to centuries that tune the brush
With muffled, inevitable good-byes
And eyes, glued to the screens of here and now
Cannot quite hold the fullness of it all
Resigning Evidence to tears that flow
In mimicking of rain and leaves that fall
Beneath the touch and tripe of troubadours
Who know the pen can never quite descry
The pathos and the beauty that soft-pours
Against the backdrop of bare trees and sky

© Janet Martin

The Full Impact of Caught Between





On afternoons like this I miss the way it used to be
Before The After played its part
And humored history

There’s something about blue-gray baritone that steals my heart
And makes me wish for days before
After painted its art

The clock indulges vanity until it disappears
We are all part of a bigger
Masterpiece of yester-years

The interlude before After and after spent Befores
Can feel surreal though dressed in common
Cloth of common chores

Seasons are more than blue-eyed, button-nosed half-kiss affairs
They tune our touch with learning and our
Fellowship with prayers

Their intermingling rush of greeting and love’s farewell kiss
Can make one feel quite caught between
On afternoons like this

© Janet Martin



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


October Falls in Rain




October falls in rain today
She drowns the yard with yellow leaves
And courts high-noon in mourner’s gray
Yet drips in diamonds from the eaves
Where all the colors of the world
Gather in legions at her feet
Because October is unfurled
With girlish sorrow; bittersweet

October weeps in poetry
An epilogue of leaf- shaped tears
That draws the reader to a sea
Of autumn sweeping over years
And in its undertow of plumes
And orchard-ghost-town thoroughfares
A soul-song of summer entombs
The looms that spun bloom-brocade chairs

October unravels her crown
With rivers running wild through trees
It turns umbrellas upside-down
And fills spilled rills with memories
Of once-upon-a-summer’s-day
When all the world was flower-twined
Before October's rainy day
That wove a trail of leaves behind

© Janet Martin