Happy Thanksgiving America

The Harvest Moon

  by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes

  And roofs of villages, on woodland crests

  And their aerial neighborhoods of nests

  Deserted, on the curtained window-panes

Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes

  And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!

  Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,

  With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!

All things are symbols: the external shows

  Of Nature have their image in the mind,

  As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;

The song-birds leave us at the summer's close,

  Only the empty nests are left behind,

  And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.