The Early Years: Jack-O’-Lantern

A while back my parents sent me a big package full of old school papers and such, whence I got the, um, amazing space battle drawing that I posted a few weeks ago. Reaching into this package today, I discovered this small exercise in giant block-letter printing, in which the moon has what may be an overly familiar relationship with a pumpkin:

I don’t know the origin of this little poem, although I’m quite sure I didn’t make it up myself.  I have written some stories in which pumpkins or jack-o’-lanterns figure prominently (notably “You“) but my later jack-o’-lanterns are nothing like this innocuous little fellow — unless perhaps, after the poem ended, it detached itself from the post and started roaming around the town eating trick-or-treaters (to the horror or delight of the moon, depending on whether the moon was benign or malevolent).  That does sound more like something I would have come up with, doesn’t it?

UPDATE 3/16/2009:

My thanks to Jennifer at the Happy Pit Bull blog, who identified this poem.  See her comment below.  Here is the full text of the original version of the poem from the link that she provided:

The man in the moon looked down on the field
Where the golden pumpkin lay,
He winked at him and he blinked at him
In the funniest kind of a way.

The pumpkin was yellow and fat and round
And as funny as he could be
But strange was his case for he had no face
So he couldn’t smile back, you see.

But on All Hallowe’en, when the moon looked down
From the sky, through the shadows dim,
The pumpkin fat on a gate-post sat,
And saucily laughed at him.

— Anna C. Ayer