Sons

Some friends had their first child tonight, a boy. It got me thinking about parents and children, how relationships seem pretty simple at the beginning and get more tangled as time goes on. It doesn't lessen those connections, but it does make them knottier.


This is one of Robert Hayden's best-known poems. It's definitely got one of the finest one-two punches I've read, the final lines. Especially during Holy Week, these ideas of fathers, sons and that austere, lonely love seem to resonate with me.

Those Winter Sundays

Robert Hayden

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?