decomposition

While we only just carved our home pumpkins yesterday (a truly awesome pair that resulted from a rash promise: "If you can carry it as far as the wagon you can have it") and roasted the seeds, some of our classroom pumpkins are moldering interestingly.  I went looking for a pumpkin seed poem and found this, from an Irish poet I didn't know.


Totem

All Souls’ over, the roast seeds eaten, I set
on a backporch post our sculpted pumpkin
under the weather, warm still for November.
Night and day it gapes in at us
through the kitchen window, going soft
in the head. Sleepwalker-slow, a black rash of ants
harrows this hollow globe, munching
the pale peach flesh, sucking its seasoned
last juices dry. In a week, when the ants and
humming flies are done, only a hard remorseless light
drills and tenants it through and through. Within,
it turns mould-black in patches, stays
days like this while the weather takes it
in its shifty arms: wide eye-spaces shine,
the disapproving mouth holds firm....


~ Eamon Grennan

Read the rest here, and snack on the roasty toasty Poetry Friday noodles of autumn with Diane at Random Noodling.