Laura Bush's WaPo article & a poem for fathers

9:20 am 18 June 2018

Belated happy Father's Day to all the Father's and mothers and people who act as fathers out there in booklikes world!

Two things: A great article by former US First Lady Laura Bush on the horrors of separating children from families found in the Washington Post. Good for her speaking up.

And on a less political note - a poem I've always found incredibly poignant about fathers

Those Winter Sundays (a poem that could be for Father's Day) 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?

Source: Collected Poems of Robert Hayden (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1985)

"So it goes."