DAY 187 - COUNT DOWN TO THE 50TH

GOOD MORNING, CLASS OF '64

Rain replaces snow this good, Sunday morning. A green patch in the yard grows wider and touches a narrow snow strip that curves like a river into the woods. Dingy, rain packed snow, mounded at the curb, is an over sized snow cone. The roofs are bare. And, finally, no snow fills the corners of the porch. January snow will soon be gone but February snow will come.

***

Those Winter Sundays

  by Robert Hayden

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? 

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19217#sthash.Xt