A Poem for all those pies

I've decided I'm going to trot this poem out every year until it (or you) cries for mercy. 

After hours of stuffing assembly and squash mashing - not to mention the half batch of cookies that slid right off the cookie sheet, dragging the parchment paper with them and which promptly burst into flame - I'm unlikely to come up with a post filled with clever repartee or a deeply cogent comment on life.  

Right now I barely have the strength to lift the burnt wads of gingersnaps to my mouth. 

This poem also used up an alarming number of fading grey cells when I produced it, and I may never be that ambitious again.

                                                 Thanksgiving Villanelle   

(FYI:  A villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The form is made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem’s two concluding lines. 
The form could be expressed as: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2.
Phew! )

Do not surrender on Thanksgiving Day

As the table creaks and groans beneath its load,

For on your waistline those calories will lay.

I sit as in Aunt Pauline will sashay

With green bean casserole, onions a la mode.

Do not surrender on Thanksgiving Day

Bowls tour the table in an endless relay.

Potatoes, stuffing, they tempt and they goad,

I fear on my waistline those calories will lay.

“Have more!” Grandmother will lean in to say

and to sweet faded eyes my will has been bowed.

Do not surrender on Thanksgiving Day.

The butter calls richly, the gravy betrays,

Pies wait with menace, and whipped cream forbodes:

Soon on my waistline those calories will lay.

Too late for me, my stretch pants cry, “oi vey!”

Save yourself and resist the family code.

Do not surrender on Thanksgiving Day,

Don’t give a new home for those calories to lay. 

                                     Happy Thanksgiving