Thanksgiving Poetry
12 Thanksgiving Poems That Will Help Set the Tone for Your Holiday Gathering and find poems about gratitude, family, food, home, and giving thanks for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Thanksgiving is a special holiday in the United States. It's a time for people to come together and be thankful for the good things in their lives. Families and friends often gather to celebrate.
On Thanksgiving Day, many people have a big meal, which usually includes turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and pumpkin pie. It's a time to share delicious food and enjoy each other's company.
One tradition on Thanksgiving is to go around the table and say what you are thankful for. Some people are thankful for their families, their friends, or their favorite toys. It's a way to remind ourselves of the good things we have.
People might also watch a parade or a football game on TV. Some families like to take a walk together to enjoy the beautiful fall colors. In some places, there are even turkey trot races where people run or walk for fun.
Thanksgiving is not just about food and fun. It's a time to remember the importance of being grateful and appreciating the people in our lives. It's a day to say, "Thank you" for all the good things.
1. My November Guest
By Robert Frost
My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
2. November
Show's over, folks. And didn't October do
A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries
Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.
Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees.
Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage,
While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees
Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage
And gone to shiver in their winter clusters.
Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge
On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster
Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin,
Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.
Even the swarms of kids have given in
To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure:
TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains.
The days throw up a closed sign around four.
The hapless customer who'd wanted something
Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.
3. One day is there of the series
By Emily Dickinson
4. GRATITUDE
By Susan Lundvigson
The body is a boat gliding
down the river whose fragrance
spins us to the shady places
under apple trees
and into bedrooms.
When it ties up at shore,
the soul drifts and returns.
More and more I see
how everything goes together.
There is such grace
in this reconciliation -
even the stomach,
that restless loner,
begins to understand.
Surely the body is mind's
gift to the soul. How else
would the dance of ecstasy begin,
except in the muscles,
in how the eyes
light on beauty and
expand it, blue
when it needs blue?
Think how love penetrates
like music, rhythm
overpowering stasis
as the nerves, the pulse,
propel us toward moonlight,
and how the body celebrates
wholeness, its first desire.
Word Meaning:
gliding = the sport or activity of flying in a glider.
reconciliation = a situation in which two people or groups of people become friendly again after they have argued.
ecstasy = a state of extreme happiness, especially when feeling pleasure
penetrates = a state of extreme happiness, especially when feeling pleasure
propel = to push or move something somewhere, often with a lot of force.
Autumn Poem
By Alexander Posey
In the dreamy silence
Of the afternoon, a
Cloth of gold is woven
Over wood and prairie;
And the jaybird, newly
Fallen from the heaven,
Scatters cordial greetings,
And the air is filled with
Scarlet leaves, that, dropping,
Rise again, as ever,
With a useless sigh for
Rest- and it is Autumn.
5. Thanksgiving DayBy Lyndia Maria Child
My November Guest By Robert Frost
6. A Song for Merry Harvest
By Eliza Cook
Bring forth the harp, and let us sweep its fullest, loudest string.
The bee below, the bird above, are teaching us to sing
A song for merry harvest; and the one who will not bear
His grateful part partakes a boon he ill deserves to share.
The grasshopper is pouring forth his quick and trembling notes;
The laughter of the gleaner’s child, the heart’s own music floats.
Up! up! I say, a roundelay from every voice that lives
Should welcome merry harvest, and bless the God that gives.
7. A Thanksgiving Poem
By Paul Laurence Dunbar
Thou hast, with ever watchful eye,
Looked down on us with holy care,
And from thy storehouse in the sky
Hast scattered plenty everywhere.
Then lift we up our songs of praise
To thee, O Father, good and kind;
To thee we consecrate our days;
Be thine the temple of each mind.
With incense sweet our thanks ascend;
Before thy works our powers pall;
Though we should strive years without end,
We could not thank thee for them all.
The Harvest Moon By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow8. The Harvest Moon
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes
And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
And their aerial neighborhoods of nests
Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!
Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
Of Nature have their image in the mind,
As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer's close,
Only the empty nests are left behind,
And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.
Word Meaning:
gilded = covered with a thin layer of gold or a substance that looks like gold.
quail = a small, brown bird that is shot for sport or food, or the meat.
sheaves = a number of things, especially pieces of paper or plantstems, that are held or tied together.
deserted = left alone in a difficult situation.
9. Thanksgiving
By Ella Wheeler Wilcox
We ought to make the moments notes
Of happy, glad Thanksgiving;
The hours and days a silent phrase
Of music we are living.
And so the theme should swell and grow
As weeks and months pass o’er us,
And rise sublime at this good time,
A grand Thanksgiving chorus.
10. Lord, 'tis Thy plenty-dropping hand
By Robert Herrick
Lord, 'tis Thy plenty-dropping hand
That soils my land,
And giv'st me for my bushel sown
Twice ten for one.
All this, and better, Thou dost send
Me, to this end,
That I should render, for my part,
A thankful heart.
11. 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.
12. Nothing Gold Can Stay
By Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
