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?
Robert Hayden was born in 1913 into a poor family in Detroit. He was so nearsighted that he wound up spending more time with books than sports in childhood. He earned a scholarship to college in the early 1930s and later a graduate degree in literature from the University of Michigan. He wrote numerous books of poetry, taught for many years at Fisk University and the University of Michigan, and became the first African American to serve as what is now called the nation’s Poet Laureate.
Copyright Credit: “Those Winter Sundays”. Copyright © 1966 by Robert Hayden, from COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT HAYDEN by Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher.
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