Mr. Macklin's Jack O'Lantern

Mr. Macklin's Jack O'Lantern

by David McCord

Mr. Macklin takes his knife 

And carves the yellow pumpkin face: 

Three holes bring eyes and nose to life, 

The mouth has thirteen teeth in place. 

Then Mr. Macklin just for fun 

Transfers the corn-cob pipe from his 

Wry mouth to Jack's, and everyone 

Dies laughing! O what fun it is 

Till Mr. Macklin draws the shade 

And lights the candle in Jack's skull. 

Then all the inside dark is made 

As spooky and as horrorful 

As Halloween, and creepy crawl 

The shadows on the tool-house floor, 

With Jack's face dancing on the wall. 

O Mr. Macklin! where's the door?

Another quick Halloween poem by McCord:

On Halloween, what bothers some

About these witches is, how come

In sailing through the air like bats

They never seem to lose their hats?

How fun are these poems!  David McCord (1897-1997) was a renowned author of children's poetry and also wrote adult poetry and prose.  McCord, who was born in New York City in 1897, lived for a while in Princeton, N.J. At 12, he moved with his family to Oregon, where he lived on an uncle's farm on the edge of a wilderness. It was there, he later wrote, that he learned, ''Poetry is rhythm, just as the planet Earth is rhythm; the best writing, poetry or prose -- no matter what the message it conveys -- depends on a very sure and subtle rhythm.''

McCord graduated from Harvard with a bachelor of arts in 1921 and received a master's in chemistry in 1922. He became an editor of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin the next year, and from 1925 until his retirement in 1963 was the executive director of the Harvard Fund Council. In 1956, Harvard awarded him its first honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

He wrote or edited more than 40 books of poetry and prose. Among them were ''One at a Time,'' a collection of his children's verse published in 1978 by Little, Brown; ''On Occasion,'' a collection of his occasional verse published in 1943 by Harvard University Press; ''About Boston,'' a collection of essays about the city first published in 1948 by Doubleday and reprinted in 1964 by Little, Brown, and ''What Cheer,'' an anthology of British and American humorous and witty verse published by Coward-McCann in 1945 and reprinted in 1946 as ''The Pocket Book of Humorous Verse.''