ROBERT HAYDEN ~

 

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.

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

African American Poetry

250 Years of struggle & song

Kevin Young, editor

Library of America

2020

ROBERT HAYDEN ~

Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,   

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,   

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,   

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more   

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:   

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro   

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world   

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,   

this man, superb in love and logic, this man   

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,   

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives   

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

__________________

ROBERT HAYDEN

Collected Poems

edited by Frederick Glaysher

Liveright 1985

 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-hayden