Published: June 15, 2008 10:54 am      

On Poetry: Non-Hallmark words for father

It's tempting to feel obligated to think Hallmark thoughts on Mother's Day and Father's Day, both of them seemingly designed to sell greeting cards. But lives seldom fit greeting cards.

The African-American poet Robert Hayden (1913-1980) was raised in a Detroit ghetto by a foster family. His house was full of fights and beatings, "chronic angers," as his poem says, which resulted in terrible bouts of depression for him as an adult. He was nearsighted and short, often ostracized by his peers.

Hayden was a voracious reader, which no doubt enabled him to graduate from Detroit City College (Wayne State University) and finish a master's degree at the University of Michigan. In 1976-78, he was chosen as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a post that is now called the U.S. poet laureate.

The poem below is his most well-known, one that deals with authentic, non-Hallmark memory, full of pain and fatherly love.

What strikes me is the simplicity and precision of the language. Just the memory of a man getting up to start the fire on cold mornings. It's the grown son speaking. We enter the poem as if in the middle of a tale.

I like the "blueblack" cold, suggesting a lump of coal. And, of course, it's the fire that's splintering and breaking, but the cold is so cold it feels solid enough to need to be broken.

You can hear in the exquisite last lines all the anguish and all the love combined. He's using the word "offices" in the religious sense, sacred responsibilities such as that of a vicar or priest. And they are "austere" -- it's a plain and hard life here. Yet the father has done what he could.

Those Winter Sundays

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.

Id wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, hed 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 loves austere and lonely offices?

Fleda Brown, of Traverse City, is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. You can learn more about her on her Web site, fledabrown.com.