Thanksgiving
by Charlie
Langton
This is Michael Carey for Voices
from the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary
tradition. Today we hear from Charlie Langton a poet who hails from Decorah
in northeast Iowa. One of the few Irishman working in the Vesterheim Norwegian
Museum. Still come November he feels inexplicably thankful when he sees some
wild turkeys. The sight sets him thinking about how we’re all invited to
a feast, sometimes as the guest sometimes as the dinner, still it’s a blessed
one with something unseen guiding it all.
Thanksgiving
for Karla, Marilyn, and Terri
I live where turkeys are
untrussed roamers. Today
I spotted two standing
untypically still,
like they were sentinels
honoring silently
their brave, fallen brothers
shot and served up on plates
to thank the Almighty.
Of course it was the sun,
untypically warm
this late in November,
the chill in their birdy
bones, and other urgent
requirements of life,
and not the unquiet
souls of their roasted dead,
that really made them pose
like two lawn ornaments
between the corn stubble
and the bare sinkhole trees.
But they seemed otherwise.
They seemed the way things seem
now and then on clear days,
untypically full
of everything else,
their martyred relations,
the beige, harvested field
they stood in, Thanksgiving,
the way the future’s filled
with the unfinished past,
like parents in the child,
The victim in the brute,
the enemy inside
a trusted friend, the one
in us, and maybe as
unintentionally,
the god inside us all.
"Thanksgiving" by
Charlie Langton from the book Keep Silence, But Speak Out published by
Loess Hills Books, originally published in Trapeze.
For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.
Biography
Charlie Langton lives in Decorah, Iowa, where he works a s Media Director at Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum. A poor peaceful Irishman amongst all those vicious Vikings. His poetry has appeared in various literary journals. His first book Keep Silence, but Speak Out was published in 1998 by Loess Hills Books.