Thanksgiving Dinner by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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.