Thanksgiving Dinner

Ah, broken garden, frost on the melons and on the beans!
Frozen are the ripe tomatoes, the red fruit and the hairy golden stem;
Frozen are the grapes, and the vine above them frozen, and the peppers are frozen!
And I walk among them smiling,-for what of them?

I can live on the woody fibres of the overgrown
Kohl-rabi, on the spongy radish coarse and hot,
I can live on what the squirrels may have left of the beechnuts and the acorns . . .
For pride in my love, who might well have died, and did not.

I will cook for my love a banquet of beets and cabbages,
Leeks, potatoes, turnips, all such fruits
For my clever love, who has returned from further than the far east;
We will laugh like spring above the steaming, stolid winter roots.