Poetry Sunday: Theme in Yellow


The frost may not yet be on the pumpkin, at least here in zone 9a, but the pumpkins are definitely out. You see them everywhere it seems. And pumpkin, or pumpkin spice, is the favorite flavor of the moment.

Carl Sandburg certainly wasn't thinking of pumpkin spice lattes when he wrote this ode to the pumpkin, but he was celebrating the joy that we find in the big yellow-orange squash. It is very much the symbol of the season. 

Theme in Yellow


BY CARL SANDBURG
I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.

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