1. Read the poem 

2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

4. Use the selection of prompts below the poem

5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blue black cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wait 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 loves austere and lonely offices?

—Robert Hayden
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hayden

Robert Hayden was the first African Aerican to serve as US Poet Laureate

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Next Read Around is July 29, 2022 at 4:00 PM (PST)

My Thoughts

The whole history of my childhood changes if loving acts are defined by care and provision and not by loving intention. Robert Hayden‘s poem, Those Winter Sundays, fills the “loving” gap by reflecting on the fire his father made to warm the house early on Sunday mornings. Perhaps it was hard to see it as caring through the “chronic angers” of that house at the time. No one ever thanked the father for the warmth of that fire. It is easy, as a child, to take the world as it is without considering what it takes to provide it. For instance, I never thanked mom for the lunch she packed every day I went to elementary school. I never thanked dad for turning our garage into a recreation room with a pool table, a ping-pong table, a shuffleboard, and a working Coke machine that took recycled quarters. I took it all for granted: a roof overhead, food on the table, clothes to wear, a bed to sleep in. Even the year it took to get two new letters every month of the Encyclopedia Brittanica and the widened world it opened in my mind never garnered my gratitude despite my eager anticipation of their arrival. These are among many things my parents did and did not mention whatever the joy or burden it might’ve taken them to provide it. Now, 60 years later, knowing love's austere and loneliness offices, I can look back on those acts with a different lens.

Prompt Menu

1. Journal or write a poem about the rhythms and patterns of your parents/caretakers. What was a tyical schedule for your father or mother? How did weekdays differ from weekends?

2. Journal or write a list poem of acts of service your parents/caretakers did for you and for which you may never have expressed gratitude.

3. Pick some everday act your father, mother, or caretaker did and describe what an observer might see, hear, smell, taste or touch in vivid detail?

4. Journal or write a poem about the context and situational aspects that your parents/caretakers faced while raising you. What factors, stressors, worries might have contributed to their choices, limited their emotional bouyancy, and constrained their effectiveness as caretakers. Of course this may vary dramatically and, if helpful, pick a specific period of time to consider (infancy, preschool, early school, teenager, etc).

5. Hayden descirbes the “chronic angers” of the house in which he grew up. What chronic mental/emotional state in your hung in the atmosphere of your home when you were young.

6. Use Hayden’s last line as a prompt: What did I know of love’s (fill in the blank or use Hayden’s phrase— austere and lonely) offices… as a prompt

7. Describe a time when you were “cold and indifferent” to your family or someon you love. As an added step, contrast that with a time when someone you love was cold and indifferent to you (especially if you did not know why). You can also journal or write about an act of caring you perform quietly, in your own austere and lonely manner, without announcing it or seeking approval for it.

8. As usual, write about whatever else inspires you from the poem or from life.