Happy Thanksgiving! You might have been expecting that familiar black-and-white video of William Burroughs reading his “Thanksgiving Prayer,” a Wonkette tradition since 2006. But as we mentioned last year, not every tradition needs to be maintained simply because it’s a habit, and we’ve decided to no longer run the Burroughs piece on Thanksgiving. It was bitter and cynical and wonderfully bitchy about this country, its ugly self-glorifying hypocrisy, and its “last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.”
But we finally decided to no longer put Burroughs front and center, considering that in 1951 he got away with either murder or callous indifference that left Joan Vollmer dead, and that his career went along just fine after that, because sure he killed a woman, but what a genius. The poem’s still there on YouTube, but how about we celebrate some other voices?
Last year we asked you to suggest some new directions for our Thanksgiving poem feature, and you offered some excellent choices. I’ve picked two this year; maybe we’ll keep them next year, or maybe we’ll just do new works every year, assuming we keep having years.
You probably already know former National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, whose poem “The Hill We Climb” was written for Joe Biden’s Inauguration. It was more recently determined to be too stuffed with “critical race theory” for elementary students in a Florida school district, although at least it stayed on the shelves for middle school.
Gorman wrote “The Republic Gives Thanks” for “CBS This Morning” in 2018. I love its invocation of the holiday’s origins during the Civil War, at our previous worst time of national disunity, when
Abraham Lincoln declared a day of gratitude Shared by one heart and one voice of America. A proclamation for a nation in a nightmare
Enjoy:
The poem also sets an uneasy place at the table for the legacy of colonialism, which like its symptom slavery has always been lurking around the meal but may best be defanged by recognition and reconciliation (and let’s say it, reparations):
If we dream past pilgrims and the mast of the Mayflower, It may empower us to bravely learn From the People of the First Light, To return to Lincoln’s fight, To furnish our might by uniting around Any piece of peace, no matter how small. We still hear all these first teachers, Called by the will of those still here on this earth, Like the Wampanoag, who show us the worthiest Way to give thanks for our blessings Isn’t to hog them, but to give them away.
And dear Crom thank you, Ms. Gorman, for reminding the Thanksgiving morning viewers that Native Americans aren’t school play costumes or convenient tropes, but people who are still very much here and have plenty to say. (Yes, that’s yet another Thanksgiving poem — or more a poem replying to Thanksgiving — “America, I Sing Back,” by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke).
This achingly lovely 1951 poem by Joy Harjo, who served as the 23rd US poet laureate herself, from 2019 to 2022, isn’t explicitly about the Thanksgiving holiday, but oh my, this poem that celebrates the kitchen table is about everything that matters about the holiday: home, family, love, food and company, and yes, conflict and broken hopes, too:
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table. [...] Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
Here’s video of Harjo reading the poem, from Poets.Org:
She reads the last line a bit softly, so let’s transcribe:
“Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.”
May your Thanksgiving table be as loud and rowdy or as serene and fellowshippy as you need it to be, whether the family gathered there is the one you were born into, glued on to through romance, built together by you and those close to you, and even if it’s just you, by choice or circumstance — Yr Wonkette understands that forced jolliness can be a pain in the ass, too. Together we’re a community too, and by Crom we may just decide to watch the MST3K’s Turkey Day marathon all damn day. My gosh, I watched the very first one, way back in 1991.
A happy and safe Thanksgiving to all Wonkers everywhere, and remember to Buy (almost) Nothing tomorrow. We love you.
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