Those Winter Sundays

I was clearing out a few notebooks from college this weekend and found this poem I had copied out. It reminds me of my Dad, how he’d be up before the rest of us to add logs to our wood stove day after day, all winter. I thought you might like it, too.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

— Robert Hayden

Many years ago I used to share poems quite often (the last one in 2011). There are some breathtaking gems in those archives, if you’re looking for something beautiful today.

Photo by Whitney Neal via Southern Weddings