A preacher’s kids’ most favorite holiday
not Christmas or Easter, should he dismay?
But rather that pagan day when witches
and warlocks have children frightened to stitches,
when mothers spend days stitching beautiful
maidens, pandas and those ghosts dutiful
to the task of scaring everyone out of their wits
on the last day of October, the day of clenched fists
and hands held up to faces and eyes so wide
and emotions that virtually no one can hide.
It is then and there that the preacher so scared
when the children have returned from their
nocturnal, clandestine journeys here and there
offer their father all the sweets in the bag so fair
and he says as he opens a particularly sweet treat,
“I hope this teaches you a moral lesson complete.
You think you’ve outsmarted the goblins; well, maybe,
but first and foremost, may I have just one more
sweet treat?”