Father Poems: Those Winter Sundays & Yesterday

Daddy at the Long Island House

Dapper Daddy 1940s

I'm posting a couple of father poems today in honor of my own father, who would have been 101 on March 29, 2012...but it's impossible to imagine him that old. He died in 1978, still in his 60s, and I realize with a start that I have now lived more than half my life without him. I've written about him often in this blog...when I was growing up, he was the center of my universe, and everything I know of love and duty seems to have begun with him.

Both of these poems express the feeling I still carry with me of not having thanked him enough for all he did or let him know how much I loved him. In the way that young people are, I was always too busy, too clever, too distracted by the pull and push of my own desires and misconceptions. In any case, these poems assure me I am not alone in that feeling.

Annie Dillard wrote, "There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom." 

Perhaps it's the nature of the human heart to learn a little too slowly; perhaps we can make up for it by paying attention now.

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?”

And this is

YESTERDAY by W.S. Merwin:

“My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father

he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father’s hand the last time
he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he said
I don’t want you to feel that you
have to
just because I’m here

I say nothing

he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don’t want to keep you

I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know

though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do

”