As I wait for the traffic light to change on the corner of Broadway and 48^th Street NE, I look beyond the negative rhetoric of the campaign signs to the bright orange ribbed squash scattered on the hillside.  I try to calculate the number of pumpkin pies still awaiting harvest and think of Carl Sandburg.  Then the light changes. I turn left and, once home, I pull a can of Libby’s, Libby’s Libby’s on the label, label, label from the round corner lazy Susan.

Theme in Yellow

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 children know
I am fooling.

Credits:

Bibliographic: © Carl Sandburg, Theme in Yellow, from Chicago Poems. New York: Henry Colt and Company, 1916.

Photo: Pexels, lure_of_adventure