I’m being super-duper busy and important at the moment; splitting my time between some freelance crisis management and desperately trying to get the living room finished before my family arrive for our first Christmas in Manchester.

I only mention it because I want to stress how tired I am at the moment. And when I get tired, my bladder moves closer to my eyes.

So when I chanced upon this poem earlier today, it literally made me sob. Just once, but quite loudly and unexpectedly.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback 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?

Robert Hayden

I haven’t really been able to study it in depth, but I think that the emotional belly-punch is in that beautiful last sentence - and I’m thinking on, but I don’t think that I’ve ever read a poem in which I find myself being able to identify with both the narrator and the subject.

So anyway, I’ll leave it here on the blog so I don’t have to read it for a while and I can continue sitting at this strange desk in a strange office, shouting the odds at people I don’t know.