Thanksgiving Poems to Express Your Gratitude! If you celebrate Thanksgiving to show gratitude, what better way to express it than with poetry? After all, the great poets of yesteryear and today say it best. So we rounded up some poems to read, reflect on, and share this Thanksgiving and all year long—whenever you're feeling grateful, really. From historical poems to contemporary works of resistance that highlight the problematic roots of the holiday to more abstract pieces paying tribute to the beauty, love, and connection all around us, keep reading for a library of moving Thanksgiving poems ahead.
Butter BY ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
My mother loves butter more than I do,
more than anyone. She pulls chunks off
the stick and eats it plain, explaining
cream spun around into butter! Growing up
we ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon
and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles,
butter melting in small pools in the hearts
of Yorkshire puddings, butter better
than gravy staining white rice yellow,
butter glazing corn in slipping squares,
butter the lava in white volcanoes
of hominy grits, butter softening
in a white bowl to be creamed with white
sugar, butter disappearing into
whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple,
butter melted and curdy to pour
over pancakes, butter licked off the plate
with warm Alaga syrup. When I picture
the good old days I am grinning greasy
with my brother, having watched the tiger
chase his tail and turn to butter. We are
Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite
historical revision, despite
our parent’s efforts, glowing from the inside
out, one hundred megawatts of butter.
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When Giving Is All We Have - Alberto Ríos
One river gives
Its journey to the next.
We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.
We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.
We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—
Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.
Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:
Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.
You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me
What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made
Something greater from the difference.
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Thanksgiving - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
We walk on starry fields of white
And do not see the daisies;
For blessings common in our sight
We rarely offer praises.
We sigh for some supreme delight
To crown our lives with splendor,
And quite ignore our daily store
Of pleasures sweet and tender.
Our cares are bold and push their way
Upon our thought and feeling.
They hand about us all the day,
Our time from pleasure stealing.
So unobtrusive many a joy
We pass by and forget it,
But worry strives to own our lives,
And conquers if we let it.
There’s not a day in all the year
But holds some hidden pleasure,
And looking back, joys oft appear
To brim the past’s wide measure.
But blessings are like friends, I hold,
Who love and labor near us.
We ought to raise our notes of praise
While living hearts can hear us.
Full many a blessing wears the guise
Of worry or of trouble;
Far-seeing is the soul, and wise,
Who knows the mask is double.
But he who has the faith and strength
To thank his God for sorrow
Has found a joy without alloy
To gladden every morrow.
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.
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Thanksgiving Day [“Over the river and through the wood”] BY LYDIA MARIA CHILD
Over the river and through the wood,
To grandfather's house we go;
The horse knows the way
To carry the sleigh
Through the white and drifted snow.
Over the river and through the wood--
Oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes
And bites the nose,
As over the ground we go.
Over the river and through the wood,
To have first-rate play.
Hear the bells ring,
"Ting-a-ling-ding!"
Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day!
Over the river and through the wood,
And straight through the barn-yard gate.
We seem to go
Extremely slow--
It is so hard to wait!
Over the river and through the wood--
Now grandmother's cap I spy!
Hurrah for the fun!
Is the pudding done?
Hurrah for the pumpkin-pie!
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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.
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THANKSGIVING IN THE ANTHROPOCENE By Craig Santos Perez
Thank you, instant mashed potatoes, your bland taste
makes me feel like an average American. Thank you,
incarcerated Americans, for filling the labor shortage
and packing potatoes in Idaho. Thank you, canned
cranberry sauce, for your gelatinous curves. Thank you,
Ojibwe tribe in Wisconsin, your lake is now polluted
with phosphate-laden discharge from nearby cranberry
bogs. Thank you, crisp green beans, you are my excuse
for eating dessert later. Thank you, indigenous migrant
workers, for picking the beans in Mexico’s farm belt,
may your children survive the journey. Thank you, NAFTA,
for making life so cheap. Thank you, Butterball Turkey,
for the word, butterball, which I repeat all day butterball,
butterball, butterball because it helps me swallow the bones
of genocide. Thank you, dark meat for being so juicy
(no offense, dry and fragile white meat, you matter too).
Thank you, 90 million factory farmed turkeys, for giving
your lives this holiday season. Thank you, factory farm
workers, for clipping turkey toes and beaks so they don’t scratch
and peck each other in overcrowded, dark sheds. Thank you,
genetic engineering and antibiotics, for accelerating
their growth. Thank you, stunning tank, for immobilizing
most of the turkeys hanging upside down by crippled legs.
Thank you, stainless steel knives, for your sharpened
edge and thirst for throat. Thank you, de-feathering
tank, for your scalding-hot water, for finally killing the last
still conscious turkeys. Thank you, turkey tails, for feeding
Pacific Islanders all year round. Thank you, empire of
slaughter, for never wasting your fatty leftovers. Thank you,
tryptophan, for the promise of an afternoon nap—
I really need it. Thank you, store bought stuffing,
for your ambiguously ethnic flavor, you remind me
that I’m not an average American. Thank you, gravy,
for being hot-off-the-boat and the most beautiful
brown. Thank you, dear readers, for joining me at this
table. Please hold hands, bow your heads, and repeat
after me: “Let us bless the hands that harvest and butcher
our food, bless the hands that drive delivery trucks
and stock grocery shelves, bless the hands that cooked
and paid for this meal, bless the hands that bind
our hands and force feed our endless mouth.
May we forgive each other and be forgiven.”
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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.
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