Happy Father’s Day from GCP!

To all of the dads who are guiding and supporting your sons, your daughters, and any other children you’re helping to raise and mold, we salute and appreciate you! I hope that you’ve spent the day being celebrated; you deserve it.

To all the single moms, whom we all know hold it down as Mom and Dad so much of the time, we celebrate you as well.

In honor of Father’s Day, I’m sharing one of my favorite poems, “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. Hayden wrote this classic ode to fathers in 1962. In 1976 Hayden was the first African-American to serve as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the post now called U.S. Poet Laureate.

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?

 ©1966 by Robert Hayden.