A Chunk o’ Raisin Pie

What better way to celebrate the Fourth of July than by thrusting our hand one more time into the foaming barrel of American poetry and fetching up…

Ooh. What have we here?

Why it’s Edgar Guest!

Or as he was sometimes called, “The People’s Poet.” But how to select from among the 11,000 poems — all gems — penned by Michigan’s one and only Poet Laureate? Well, at random, of course.

Here’s a bit extracted from Good Books:

Good books your faults will never see
Or tell about them round the town.
If you would have their company
You merely have to take them down.

Then there’s this first verse from Raisin Pie:

There’s a heap of pent-up goodness
in the yellow bantam corn,
And I sort o’ like to linger
round a berry patch at morn;
Oh, the Lord has set our table
with a stock o’ things to eat
An’ there’s just enough o’ bitter
in the blend to cut the sweet,
But I run the whole list over,
an’ it seems somehow that I
Find the keenest sort o’ pleasure
in a chunk o’ raisin pie.

Our editorial plural mouth is watering! But before we we go sink our collective teeth into a chunk o’ raisin pie, we will leave you with the first verse of Out Fishin’:

A feller isn’t thinkin’ mean,
Out fishin’;
His thoughts are mostly good an’ clean,
Out fishin’.
He doesn’t knock his fellow men.,
Or harbor any grudges then;
A feller’s at his finest when
Out fishin’.