[Janice D. Soderling]

Getting back to our core business of poetry (and fiction and translations), what poems (or stories or translations) do you like that are concerned with Thanksgiving? Or the many items related to it, like pumpkin pie, native Americans, puritans, maize, family squabbles.

Here is my offering by the amazing Richard Wilbur. (That sixth stanza just blows me away. And note the beauty of the form. )

A Black November Turkey

to A.M. and A.M.

Nine white chickens come
With haunchy walk and heads
Jabbing among the chips, the chaff, the stones
And the cornhusk-shreds,

And bit by bit infringe
A pond of dusty light,
Spectral in shadow until they bobbingly one
By one ignite.

Neither pale nor bright,
The turkey-cock parades
Through radiant squalors, darkly auspicious as
The ace of spades,

Himself his own cortége
And puffed with the pomp of death,
Rehearsing over and over with strangled râle
His latest breath.

The vast black body floats
Above the crossing knees
As a cloud over thrashed branches, a calm ship
Over choppy seas,

Shuddering its fan and feathers
In fine soft clashes
With the cold sound that the wind makes, fondling
Paper-ashes.

The pale-blue bony head
Set on its shepherd’s-crook
Like a saint’s death-mask, turns a vague, superb
And timeless look

Upon these clocking hens
And the cocks that one by one,
Dawn after mortal dawn with vulgar joy
Acclaim the sun.