So Halloween is about a month away, & perhaps not on anyone's mind right now; but where I teach, it's a reasonably big deal, and moreover, I'll be dressing up in a particularly humorous costume, so I'm looking forward to it. Moreover, the literary magazine at my school, which I advise, will be hosting a Halloween-themed Poetry Slam in an effort to drum up schoolwide interest. Right now I'm looking to gather a nice collection of poems so that if no one writes anything, we'll still be able to perform and have some fun. Anybody have or know any poems to help me out?

I'll start. I remember this one by Alicia, posted a few years ago around Halloween:

A Bone to Pick With You

It's time to take the skeleton out of the closet,
Where it has lain these months in the catalogued gloom,
Stored bone by bone in boxes and brown paper parcels:

Femurs, vertebrae, fibulas, skull, meta-tarsals.
It's time to put it together with wires and hooks,
To light the sullen lantern behind its sockets,

And dress it in the black suit with the fraying pockets,
And the creaking shoes with holes worn through the soles.
It's the time of year when the skeleton malingers

On the front porch, and the neighbors point their fingers,
(But nobody, nobody whispers behind our backs.)
It's time to take the skeleton out of the closet,

Where it lies the rest of the year like a safety deposit,
Accruing the interest of dust, and a layer of gossip.
Later we'll drag it back in, and bone by bone

We'll take it apart, and clean it with acetone,
And pack it in cotton-balls, muffled with tissue paper—
We'll padlock the door, so that no one can ever tattle.

But something's afraid of the dark. Hear it rattle, rattle.

Sticking with the theme of skeletons, there's this by Richard Wilbur:

To His Skeleton

Why will you vex me with
These bone-spurs in the ear,
With X-rayed phlebolith
And calculus? See here,

Noblest of armatures,
The grin which bares my teeth
Is mine as yet, not yours.
Did you not stand beneath

This flesh, I could not stand,
But would revert to slime
Informous and unmanned;
And I may come in time

To wish your peace my fate,
Your sculpture my renown.
Still, I have held you straight
And mean to lay you down

Without too much disgrace
When what can perish dies.
For now then, keep your place
And do not colonize.

Good things there. Can anybody think of others? Thanks in advance.

Chris

From my forthcoming opus illustrated by Janet Kenny

Halloween Horticulture.

Our uncle, on the distaff side,
struck us all as rather crazy;
for more than twenty years he’d tried
to graft a head onto a daisy.

But then, one stormy Halloween,
notwithstanding that she ranted,
Auntie’s head was plainly seen
upon a daisy stem, transplanted.

Now we’re all happy and agreed:
Uncle was well motivated –
though sometimes Aunty goes to seed,
we can see she’s cultivated.

Why not Robert Frost's "The Witch of Coos"? It's not a Halloween poem per se, but it is a marvelous ghost story.

What's your costume?

Since Jim's broken the ice on posting one's own work, I'll make a mockery of the "mastery" category and post an impromptu ditty of my own:

FAUX PAS

I can't tell what you're going as.
What monster, might I ask?
The ugliest creature I've ever seen!
What's that? It's not a mask?



[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited October 06, 2006).]

And here's one by a master to compensate. I think it's apt, though it doesn't invoke Halloween per se:

This Living Hand



This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

*

(John Keats)

Jim, Tom, Bob, thanks so much! I just wanted to pop in and say, 1. I'm delighted to see your own works here, as I'm less interested in "mastery" per se than things high school kids would find entertaining, & I think both your poems fit the bill. & 2. the poem does NOT have to contain the word "halloween" or have specific reference to trick-or-treating. The Keats is perfectly apt.

I'm also interested in good scary stories to read around a campfire.

Thanks again guys!

THE HALLOWEEN MEN


We are the Halloween men.
We are the scarecrows,
filled with straw, alas.
We are the headless horsemen.
The eyes are not here.
The ears are not here.
The lips that would kiss
a bonnie lass
are not here, alas.
Here our banner is raised,
skull and crossed staves.
The cellar is haunted
in this twilight kingdom.
Halloween candy
and broken jaw-breakers
litter this valley.
A star is born, second-hand Rose,
the only hope
of Halloween men.
Here we go round the mulberry bush
in the rituals of mourning
at six o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
and the ideal idea
Falls the shadow.
Life is very long
as only the Shadow knows.
this is the way the film ends
not with some fangs but a whistler


Robert Meyer

Conrad Aiken has a quite ambitious poem called "Hallowe'en" too long for me to type here. Also this, though not a poem:

BlogThis!
The Essential Ghoul's Record Shelf
A song-by-song tour through pop music's unexpected fascination with the ghastly and supernatural.

IT'S HALLOWEEN | the shaggs

THIS BAND, made up of three youthful sisters named Wiggin from New Hampshire, might have been the worst ever. Their 1969 album, the first of only two produced and portentously titled Philosophy of the World, is an assemblage of discordant, off-key instrumentals, monotone lyrics sung with muddy articulation, and a rhythmic accompaniment so lethargic that it sounds as though the drummer, Helen, had no desire to pound on her toms, and grudgingly did so after receiving a stern lecture from her father. (This scenario is possible, by the way; the band’s manager and driving force was their father, Austin Wiggin, Jr.) And yet there is something extraordinarily compelling about the songs the girls produced — so compelling that, although the band performed almost exclusively at the Town Hall and nursing homes of Fremont, NH, and although only 100 copies of their album survived post-pressing theft (the producer made off with 900 copies), Frank Zappa reportedly heard them and proclaimed the band to be “better than the Beatles.”

The Shaggs have developed a small cult following over the years, in part inspired by their unfeigned wretchedness, which, to modern ears, sounds deliberate — almost punk. “It’s Halloween” is a typical example of their songwriting, consisting of a few simple chords, strummed laconically on guitar, drumming that never seems entirely in sync with the remainder of the song, and half-hearted, homely descriptive lyrics that rely, lazily, on the most general images of the Halloween season. “The jack-o-lanterns are all lit up,” singer and songwriter Dot Wiggins drones. “All the dummies are made and stuffed.”

Listening to the girls fumble their way through this song, it’s easy to understand why Rolling Stone Magazine once said that the girls sounded “like a lobotomized Trapp Family Singers.” The song is beyond enervating, it’s narcotizing — critic Lester Bangs was reportedly astounded to discover that the sisters were not junkies. Yet the music is utterly fascinating. There is a queer consistency to this song, as there is to all of the sisters' music. The Shagg’s sound is instantly identifiable, like a frame from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — so fully its own thing that it cannot possible be anything else. But perhaps a better filmic comparison would be Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as this seems like the music that the alien pod creatures, upon assuming the identities of hapless suburbanites, would make. It’s clearly the product of a vegetable intelligence, and, unexpectedly, might just demonstrate a vegetable genius.

posted by Dr at 2:32 AM

WITH HER HEAD TUCKED UNDERNEATH HER ARM | stanley holloway
VOODOO VOODOO | lavern baker
MR. GHOST GOES TO TOWN | the five jones boys
CRISWELL PREDICTS | mae west











[This message has been edited by Mike Slippkauskas (edited October 06, 2006).]

Dora Sigerson Shorter, Irish poet, 1866 - 1918:

"All-Souls' Night"

O MOTHER, mother, I swept the hearth, I set his chair and the white board spread,
I prayed for his coming to our kindly Lady when Death's doors would let out the dead;
A strange wind rattled the window-pane, and down the lane a dog howled on,
I called his name and the candle flame burnt dim, pressed a hand the door-latch upon.
Deelish! Deelish! my woe forever that I could not sever coward flesh from fear.
I called his name and the pale ghost came; but I was afraid to meet my dear.

O mother, mother, in tears I checked the sad hours past of the year that's o'er,
Till by God's grace I might see his face and hear the sound of his voice once more;
The chair I set from the cold and wet, he took when he came from unknown skies
Of the land of the dead, on my bent brown head I felt the reproach of his saddened eyes;
I closed my lids on my heart's desire, crouched by the fire, my voice was dumb.
At my clean-swept hearth he had no mirth, and at my table he broke no crumb.
Deelish! Deelish! my woe forever that I could not sever coward flesh from fear.
His chair put aside when the young cock cried, and I was afraid to meet my dear.

Dora Sigerson Shorter

"The Fair Little Maiden"

THERE is one at the door, Wolfe O'Driscoll,
At the door, who bids you to come!
"Who is he that wakes me in the darkness,
Calling when all the world is dumb?"

Six horses has he to his carriage,
Six horses blacker than the night,
And their twelve red eyes in the shadows--
Twelve lamps he carries for his light;

His coach is a hearse black and mouldy,
Within a coffin open wide:
He asks for you soul, Wolfe O'Driscoll,
Who doth call at the door outside.

"Who let him thro' the gates of my gardens,
Where stronger bolts have never been?"
The father of the fair little maiden
You drove to her grave deep and green.

"And who let him pass through the courtyard,
Loosening the bar and the chain?"
Who but the brother of the maiden
Who lies in the cold and the rain?

"Then who drew the bolts at the portal,
And into my house bade him go?"
The mother of the poor young maiden
Who lies in her youth all so low.

"Who stands, that he dare not enter,
The door of my chamber, between?"
O, the ghost of the fair little maiden
Who lies in the churchyard green.

Dora Sigerson Shorter

Here are links to two threads at PFFA; the first contains the entire text of H. P. Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet sequence (all 36 of them), the second Donald Wandrei's Sonnets of the Midnight Hours, (20 sonnets, which were Lovecraft's inspiration) and a number of other Halloweenish poems by various hands:

Fungi from Yuggoth by H. P. Lovecraft

Sonnets of the Midnight Hours by Donald Wandrei and assorted others



[This message has been edited by Howard (edited October 06, 2006).]