Black History Month

Robert Hayden

I don’t know what it is about this one of his. Maybe because this is the only example of his work that I saw before searching for myself? Is it that I only read it around this time of the year when the air is cold and my fingers and toes always cold, even inside? Is it because I am always maudlin this time of the year, aching about a different type of a parental loss, something sometimes more subtler, sometimes more sharper than a simple estrangement? Who knows? That last line though. It touched me before I even knew what was there.

Those Winter Sundays
BY ROBERT HAYDEN

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?