How did Linus come up 
with the Great Pumpkin story, anyway?
Did it perhaps originate 
with a thirteen-year-old
skateboard punk in a black t-shirt
on his way to skipping school
some mellow September morning,
just wanting to mess 
with the thumb-sucking kid?
 
Or, perhaps a vagabond poet
passing through town
stopped to smoke a cigarette 
and spin a Halloween tale with the blanket boy
on a small bridge one blustery October day
as a silver stream below gushed 
and burbled over rocks.
 
Or, maybe at a Sunday Mass, 
with its backdrop of candlelight
and incense—of insistence 
on transubstantiation,
the priest spoke of the glory of Christ rising
and warned against Thomas, who doubted. 
 
Then, that same day, in the crisp
sundrenched afternoon, the family
took a trip to a pumpkin farm
Lucy judging each and every pumpkin
for its size, shape, and color.
 
So that in his sleep, Linus, beginning
his career as an existential philosopher,
learning to wait for what never arrives,
birthed the legend of a great, munificent, 
yet hard to please, pumpkin.