Thanksgiving - Doug Stout

[Lawrence Robinson]

Thanksgiving

I take my friends into the garden
where they remark on the weedless
ranks of ripening vegetables and fruit
of the swelling melon,
the abundant squash
cucumber, onion, pepper,
lettuce, basal, tomato,
each row a row of pride
and I am gratified, satisfied,
smugly thankful, ever vigilant,
and thankful for the taking.

I am thankful for the gopher
whose digging skill forms
catacombs beneath my cantaloupe
and who on a hungry morning
takes its share of melon meat.
Without that satiate need
to eat what I have nurtured
my garden would be a quiet place
for sweet but modest satisfactions.

I am thankful for the jay
whose precipitous assault
upon my Asian pears produces
peckhole patterns on the
still unripened flesh
without which messages
my orchard, a garden of serenity,
would seasonally bear its fruit
undramatized and sanitary.

I am thankful for the wasp
perceiving
the necessity of survival
finds on cooked or uncooked flesh
--sometimes my own-- a succulant summer menu
arouses me to know again
that pain may be to one
what is pleasure for another
and the price I pay
for so much abundance.

I am thankful for the moth
who lays its fertile eggs
on my still green apples
arousing in me strategies
to keep alive
my fruitful perfect garden dreams.


                                                         216

I am thankful by the yardful
for those hostile to my lustful
wish to claim it all
without pain or challenge,
now arousing the sentinal in me,
the garden guardian by proclamation,
where upon this territory
I plant the flag
ever ready to take up arms,
engage in chemical and biological warfare
and rid my chosen space of woe.

Ah, but will it not be easy to find enemies
who support my righteousness,
against whom I take up a holy book,
a loyal flag and heroic arms,
knowing invaders by their different speech,
by contrary tints of flesh or gender,
by some other foreign fixation,
style, habit, history
and claim of territory,
against whom I now employ
my own militant social wasps,
military cutworms and coddling moths
for the sake of my grasshopper greed
and exercise of gophermind?
Will my garden not then be a battleground
rather than a soil from which I harvest
present and future feasts?

I am thankful
that I have warned myself
how much I am a danger to myself
when I find my Eden enemies
emerging from the bushes, overhead,
underground, lurking spies and traitors
in all their civilized disguises,
tricked into existence by a
fertile but paranoic mind.

I am thankful for all that I have
and for all that I have not.
Now, if you will pardon me,
my garden is calling.

	- Doug Stout
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