Those Winter Sundays

Weather is cold in the low teens and windy today. Tasha, Elmira and I picked up Tika from the trainstation this afternoon. We did some shopping for bed frames, and had dinner at the Japanese/Chinese restaurant. Ianniq spent the afternoon splitting firewood.

Obviously,this first day of winter happens to be a Sunday this year. The wind is howling outside and the draft through these antique windows is keeping the furnace warm, if nothing else. I can think of no better occasion to post my favorite poem of all time, and one of the finest poems ever written in the English language: "Those Winter Sundays" The poem puts me in mind of the little white house, and those winter evenings when Dad would rest up after the evening news, hunched over on that dining table pine bench, trying to straighten out his back before he went out into the "blue back cold", to head off for the barn. Tied to the clocks of cows' udders, Sunday afternoons from roughly 2PM until 9 or 10PM were the extent of our family weekends. Sometimes, Dad would go downstairs and split those locust logs and fire the Ben Franklin stove before he left. Then, when he came home from milking, late after midnight he'd split some more and fire it up again.

"Those Winter Sundays" is proof that poetry doesn't need big words and flowery language. Robert Haydn's language is simple and quiet. A black poet from Wisconsin, Haydn bounced around from several foster homes, group homes and orphanages growing up. No time to research it now, but it seems to me he had many health problems as a boy and he may have been nearly blind as well. At any rate, if you can read this poem without getting a lump in your throat, you might want to have somebody check your pulse.



Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Haydn

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback 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?