Thanksgiving Poem
A Bridge Between Worlds

IntroductionIntroduction

Hello and welcome to the 2025 Thanksgiving Menu-Poem. This is the twenty-fourth incarnation of the Thanksgiving Menu-Poem! This series began in 2002 with a Menu-Poem to honor Charles Bernstein, and since then this series engages Thanksgiving as the basis to celebrate poetry, poets, and the poetry community. Being a trained professional chef, I have blended my love of food and poetry into a book-length work as a feast of words and art to bring everyone a tiny bit closer together.

This project is a conceptual meal served for the thousands of friends I would love to have over to our home on Thanksgiving Day. Since it is unavoidably impossible to even consider doing such a thing in real life, I have designed a menu of foodstuffs that reflect upon the guest of honor as a person, a poet and their poetry. These works directly respond to our surrounding environment and uses everyday experiences as a starting point. Often these are framed instances that would go unnoticed in their original context. With a conceptual approach, this menu-poem tries to increase the dynamic between audience and author by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations.

The poetry

Thanksgiving is, at its heart, a ritual of gathering, around tables, around stories, around memory. This Menu-Poem is an offering in that spirit: a meal of words, flavors, and images set before a vast and unseen community. Where others serve turkey and potatoes, here we serve poems, dishes that nourish through imagination, sustain through language, and surprise through their pairing of the everyday with the transcendent.

The poems collected in this year’s feast are shaped by the season’s gifts: reflection, abundance, and the quiet recognition of impermanence. Thanksgiving arrives at the turning of the year, when daylight thins and the air sharpens. It asks us to pause, to notice what might otherwise pass unseen, just as poetry does. Both transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, whether through a shared meal or a shared line of verse.

This year’s courses exemplify the range of what poetry can hold. “Sleeting” turns a meteorological instant into a meditation on happiness, fleeting and fragile as snowflakes dissolving in the hand. “Empty Magnification” confronts the scars we carry and the way perception distorts, intensifies, and sometimes redeems our wounds. In “A Bridge Between Worlds,” the rainbow over Niagara becomes a figure for mortality, beauty, and transcendence, while “The Works” moves with unsparing clarity from the weight of violence to the lightness of breakfast conversation. The entrée, “The Night’s Treasure,” transforms childhood defiance into dreamlike adventure, where the home itself takes flight upon floodwaters. And finally, “Everything is Bananas” serves as both jest and philosophy, reminding us that even the most commonplace fruit may contain the paradoxes of existence.

The menu

Light appears as a minor theme in this menu-poem, and the fading light of the autumnal season brings a variety of senses to mind, and with it a colorful, artful designs. The meal and wine paring captures these through aroma, temperature variations, mixed textures and flavor combinations that greet you with a serene, elegant scenery of nature. This thanksgiving feast is complemented by seasonally selected foodstuffs that not only taste well-balanced but are also pleasant to think about.

As you read through this year’s courses, I invite you to imagine yourself at the table, raising a glass, tasting words, and carrying their flavors with you. Poetry, like thanksgiving, is not a solitary act but a communal one: it is a way of sayingwe are here together, even across distance, even across silence. This Menu-Poem, then, is a bridge, a feast of gratitude where poetry is both sustenance and celebration.

I hope you enjoy this meal, the menu, the collages, and the poems. Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Rockets, Geoffrey