Happy Thanksgiving!

Here's three Thanksgiving poems. I don't think they're normal Thanksgiving poems, just poems with that as the setting and as part of the theme. They're poems that I wrote a while ago, but all poems that I really like and I hope you like them too! Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

On Thanksgiving
November in Vermont is dead.
The grass is as brown as the bare tree branches
and the garden is filled with empty dirt patches.
I can see miles of this, driving to the nearest town.
Woodstock looks alive only because there are families gathering,
preparing to give of their time,
and because the sun sometimes shines.
When the sky is overcast and menacing
even Woodstock looks caught in a fatal colorless trap

Is this true winter,
the time when our mother has just died and we are dumbstruck,
waiting for someone to cover her with a white sheet?

Looking around, it’s like I’ve given her nothing after all.
I’ve heard that caterpillars are killing the trees
and that the autumn leaves look sick
when compared to their younger years,
yet there remains some veins
through which the earth’s blood runs,
like water through a leaking pipe:
the high-bush cranberries and the wine-colored crab apples.
Both are bitter and I wish it would snow.

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Harvesting
One day before thanksgiving,
a friend and I had a petty argument over homonyms.
“The fields are ALL READY to harvest,” she corrected my poetry,
“Two words, not one.”
Yet that was incorrect as well.
What field takes up the sickle to reap itself?
And the next day was the last meeting before break.
I told myself, “Don’t argue.”
Even then my words wanted to burst out
like black birds lifting off an open plain.
But as I opened my mouth,
she stopped me,
thanked me for all that we had learned together
and wished me luck and safety in my travels.

How wise to part as friends.
How right to be grateful and forget the mistakes.
I will accept both sides as true.
We are the tree, the fruit, and the picker;
the scattered seeds and the sower;
the white rising field.
To give, we must gather ourselves.

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High-Bush Cranberries
On the mountains of dark green fading into brown
a northern wind blows beneath the twilight of fall and winter.
The birds under the light of a silver sky and pearl white sun
call and chirp as they rest their cool small wings,
perching on a plant, the High-Bush Cranberry,
whose crimson fruit mimics a rose in bloom,
whose branches look dead, ready to be burned on the evening pyre.
These birds, I surmise, must enjoy the bitter and tart taste
that I spit out after moving one morsel to my mouth.
Or perhaps they accept the bitters as the only life left to cherish,
as all that remains of the roses are thorns
and the occasional bundle of deep pink petals,
ready to fall with the final semblance of life,
to drift like a rowboat lost at sea, rocking side to side
like a cradled child, to lie on the cold, jade grass.

Before now, I had not realized all the things clinging to life
and giving thanks to the crisp clean air of morning:
the ancient apple tree down the hill, whose yellow and orange remnants
Hang like ornaments on an abandoned Christmas tree.
But it was not granted eternity, that strange blessing or curse cast on pines.
Instead it is like the tiny crab apples who, too, resist the change;
their colors reminisce of fall, while bare limbs reach into a harsh winter.
In a fortnight, I am sure, these things will be not be gone,
but be given the gift of life in a time of snowstorms waiting to happen.