Marie Gauthier

With any luck, I hope to have my computer issues resolved within a few days.  Also, presales of my chapbook are supposed to begin at the end of this week, so stay tuned for the big announcement!

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The NPR program “On Point” featured “The Making of Sonnets” in its second hour today.  Read during the show was this poem by Robert Hayden, which seems appropriate for this day-after Father’s Day; it’s a touch too wrenching for the day itself. But maybe that’s just my perspective:  My father died in 1993, and this poem so strongly reminds me of him.

And now I celebrate this day with a family of my own, and a husband who also gets up early: to put out the trash, to shovel the driveway in winter, and any numberless other dreary chores.  And I thank him. I hope, I try to,  most every day.

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?