[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.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Gravy

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”

—Raymond Carver

[Orwn Acra]

Dance of the Macabre Mice

In the land of turkeys in turkey weather
At the base of the statue, we go round and round.
What a beautiful history, beautiful surprise!
Monsieur is on horseback. The horse is covered with mice.

This dance has no name. It is a hungry dance.
We dance it out to the tip of Monsieur's sword,
Reading the lordly language of the inscription,
Which is like zithers and tambourines combined:

The Founder of the State. Whoever founded
A state that was free, in the dead of winter, from mice?
What a beautiful tableau tinted and towering,
The arm of bronze outstretched against all evil!

Wallace Stevens

&

The Crazy Woman

I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I’ll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.

I’ll wait until November
That is the time for me.
I’ll go out in the frosty dark
And sing most terribly.

And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
“That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

[Janice D. Soderling]

Thanks, Andrew and Orwn. Three very good choices.

[Erik Olson]

On such an occasion, as appropriate as pumpkin pie, maize, or Native Americans must be Puritans, indeed; yet to think that they are so made me nearly laugh for some reason. I cannot say why. Perhaps because those history classes inculcated the excesses of the round-heads who, at worst, banned artwork in the churches as well as secular music and public dancing in the years of Cromwell's banishment of the monarchy. They are a less obvious object for encomium from, first impressions, though universally admitted and received as a trope of the holiday as pilgrim's buckled hats and harvest of corn. Ironic is that Puritan appears consistently in early use as a term of reproach used by opponents and resented by those to whom it was applied. What was coined to fortify the cause of their opponents and mock their own with derision, gained currency and eventually became what is now the received and neutral term to designate these folks:

Originally the name applied chiefly to those within the Church of England who sought further reform, especially in the direction of Presbyterianism, and who gained ascendancy during the Commonwealth period. Subsequently (and especially after the Restoration of 1660) it was applied to those who separated from the established episcopal Church as Presbyterians, Independents (Congregationalists), or Baptists, including many who were prominent in the colonization of the North American seaboard (especially New England). It is now used as a historical term without negative connotations. (OED)

Few Puritans I can think of seem to so well recommend themselves to reverence and regard, by the example of their lives, than Johnathan Edwards; I first learned about him from reading Lowell's For the Union Dead where he figures more than once. "Edwards", says Wikipedia, "is widely regarded as one of America's most important and original philosophical theologians, Edwards' theological work is broad in scope, but he was rooted in Reformed theology, the metaphysics of theological determinism, and the Puritan heritage. Recent studies have emphasized how thoroughly Edwards grounded his life's work on conceptions of beauty, harmony, and ethical fittingness, and how central The Enlightenment was to his mindset."

JOHNATHAN EDWARDS IN WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS by Robert Lowell

Edwards' great millstone and rock
of hope has crumbled, but the square
white houses of his flock
stand in the open air,

out in the cold,
like sheep outside the fold.
Hope lives in doubt.
Faith is trying to do without

faith. In western Massachusetts,
I could almost feel the frontier
crack and disappear.
Edwards thought the world would end there.

We know how the world will end,
but where is paradise, each day farther
from the Pilgrim's blues for England
and the Promised Land.

Was it some country house
that seemed as if it were
Whitehall, if the Lord were there?
so nobly did he live.

Gardens designed
that the breath of flowers in the wind
or crushed underfoot,
came and went like warbling music?

Bacon's great oak grove
he refused to sell,
when he fell,
saying, "Why should I sell my feathers?"

Ah paradise! Edwards,
I would be afraid
to meet you there as a shade.
We move in different circles.

As a boy, you built a booth
in a swamp for prayer;
lying on your back,
you saw the spiders fly,

basking at their ease,
swimming from tree to tree
so high, they seemed tacked to the sky.
you knew they would die.

Poor country Berkley at Yale,
you saw the world was soul,
the soul of God! The soul
of Sarah Pierrepont!

So filled with delight in the Great Being,
she hardly cared for anything
walking the fields, sweetly singing,
conversing with someone invisible.

Then God's love shone in sun, moon and stars,
on earth, in the waters,
in the air, in the loose wind,
which used to greatly fix your mind.
m

[Bill Carpenter]

From Ecclesiastical Sonnets by Wordsworth:

WELL worthy to be magnified are they
Who, with sad hearts, of friends and country took
A last farewell, their loved abodes forsook,
And hallowed ground in which their fathers lay;
Then to the new-found World explored their way,
That so a Church, unforced, uncalled to brook
Ritual restraints, within some sheltering nook
Her Lord might worship and his word obey
In freedom. Men they were who could not bend;
Blest Pilgrims, surely, as they took for guide
A will by sovereign Conscience sanctified;
Blest while their Spirits from the woods ascend
Along a Galaxy that knows no end,
But in His glory who for Sinners died.