5 Poems for Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is a unique holiday in America. A day of gratitude, family (in all forms), food, and indulgence. In schools, the week or weeks leading up to Thanksgiving are often marked by food drives, classroom and hallway decorations, and Thanksgiving-themed lesson plans.
It’s important to note not all students will experience holidays—not just Thanksgiving—the same way. Not all students will have family to celebrate with. Not all students will have special meals or the luxury of overindulgence. Not all students approach Thanksgiving with the same cultural background. To students from Native American communities, for example, Thanksgiving can be tricky, if not downright hurtful. (If you’re interested in more information about how to treat Thanksgiving in the classroom, we recommend this Medium.com article; the author, Lindsey Passenger Wieck, has rounded up a trove of resources for families and educators who want to celebrate Thanksgiving in a more inclusive way.)
We encourage you to think inclusively about Thanksgiving and how your students may celebrate—or ignore—the holiday, especially in your lesson planning and classroom activities. To that end, we’re sharing six poems that we love that work well this time of year: two poems about November, one poem about food, one poem about a turkey who is about to become dinner, and one poem about family and connection.
“November,” by Maggie Dietz
New Hampshire poet Maggie Dietz’s “awards include the Grolier Poetry Prize, the George Bennett Fellowship and Phillips Exeter Academy” numerous fellowships, and high praise for her published works of poetry, including Perennial Fall and That Kind of Happy (uml.edu). In “November,” Dietz celebrates the autumnal work of October and the shift to winter’s November. Students should be about to spot similes (“sky like hardened plaster”), personification (“The pasty river…Coughs up reed grass,” “The days throw up a closed sign around four”), sentence length variation, and the motif of light/golden imagery.
“When the Frost is on the Punkin” by James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916)
Riley was particularly beloved for his poetry written for children. You’ll see in this poem one of Riley’s classic habits as a poet: intentionally misspelling words to reflect the ways that children sometimes pronounce them (poetryfoundation.org). If you’re annotating this in class, ask students to find these words along with these other literary features: rhyme scheme (AABBCCDD), meter and scansion (anapestic tetrameter), alliteration (f-frost, fodder, feller, feelin’), and onomatopoeia (hummin’, clickin’).
“Butter” by Elizabeth Alexander (1962—)
Elizabeth Alexander has more awards and recognitions than we can list, but we’ll try: she’s the current president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, received the Jackson Poetry Prize, and read a poem (“Praise Song for the Day”) at the inauguration of President Barak Obama. In this poem, Alexander describes her mother’s fascinating, indulgent love of butter. Ask students to track sentence length variation, visual imagery, alliteration (“grinning greasy,” “slipping squares”), yellow motif (butter, pineapple, lemon), and metaphor (“butter the lava in white volcanoes of hominy grits”).
“Signs of the Times” by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
Dunbar poetry is widely acclaimed for its representation of Black life in America at the turn of the century, and his ability to take a wide view of it—understanding “its humor, its superstitions, its shortcomings” (poetryfoundation.org). This poem is written in dialect—a style Dunbar was known for, but which does not represent the whole of his work. Ask students to watch for rhyme scheme (XAXAXBXB), meter and scansion (trochaic tetrameter), descriptions of the turkey’s behavior, alliteration (gittin’, good, gobbler, gwine, gibbin’), and the shifts into playful description and imagery.
“Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo (1951—)
We’ll use every opportunity we get to encourage you to introduce your students to former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. Her poetry celebrates her heritage and the natural world and often reflects her talent as a musician, writing poems that read like songs. In “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” she centers the role of a kitchen table to a family, exploring its different uses (teething medium for babies, object to crowd under for dogs and chickens, place of gossip and coffee drinking), and giving thanks for its role within the family. Students should be able to note Harjo’s use of repetition (we, table), the table’s literal sturdiness (scraping knees, becoming a house) and its figurative strengths (make men, make women, a place to celebrate the terrible victory), the phases of life the table sees and the way it exists as a solid base for all of those experiences—eating at the easiest, serving as a place to prepare parents for burial among the more complicated, and the way the table works to connect people to each other during those experiences.