JOHN KEENE on

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?

​John Keene is an African American writer and translator, and the author of several collections, including Punks: New and Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021), winner of the 2022 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015); and Playland (Seven Kitchens Press, 2016). He chairs the department of African American and African studies and teaches English and creative writing at Rutgers University–Newark. The recipient of a 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, he lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.