“Thanksgiving is the holiday of peace, the celebration of work and the simple life… a true folk-festival that speaks the poetry of the turn of the seasons, the beauty of seedtime and harvest, the ripe product of the year…”
RAY STANNARD BAKER (1870-1946), one of the first investigative journalists, who also wrote books for children under the pseudonym DAVID GRAYSON
Drawing: “Harvest Moon,” pastel by Jamie Pitts, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
How beautiful –
Red peppers
After the autumn gale.
YOSA BUSON
PHOTO: Len McAlpine, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
HOME
by Bruce Weigl
I didn’t know I was grateful
for such late-autumn
bent-up cornfields
yellow in the after-harvest
sun before the
cold plow turns it all over
into never.
I didn’t know
I would enter this music
that translates the world
back into dirt fields
that have always called to me
as if I were a thing
come from the dirt,
like a tuber,
or like a needful boy. End
Lonely days, I believe. End the exiled
and unraveling strangeness.
“Home” appears in Bruce Weigl’s collection The Unraveling Strangeness by Bruce Weigl, published by Grove/Atlantic. Copyright © 2003 by Bruce Weigl. All rights reserved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bruce Weigl served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 and was awarded a Bronze Star. His first full-length collection of poems was published in 1979. He has received two Pushcart Prizes, a Patterson Poetry Prize, and a Yaddo Foundation Fellowship. Weigl was awarded the Bread Loaf Fellowship in Poetry in 1981 and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988. He was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Song of Napalm.
Photo: “After the corn harvest” by Cindy Dietz, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
early morning wind
in the umbrella
of the pumpkin stand
MARLENE MOUNTAIN
Photo: Bienatole, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
How beautiful —
Red peppers
After the autumn gale.
YOSA BUSON
PHOTO: Len McAlpine, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Silver Birch Press 