Poet's Choice

As a kid, I doubted I could ever undertake for anybody a task as grisly as my daddy's preparation of the Sunday chicken: wringing its neck, relieving the purplish, prickly body of feathers, dismantling it with a butcher knife. Robert E. Hayden's reminiscence of his own father dutifully stoking the morning fire in "Those Winter Sundays" argues instead that any sacrifice for love is an elevating one.

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