Ten Poems to Say Goodbye by Roger Housden

Author:Roger Housden [Housden, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-88601-9
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2012-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

These lines remind me of some others in an unpublished poem that my friend Sherry Anderson wrote for her father:

you gave me everything I needed

though I didn’t know it then

though I wanted so much more

and differently

And now not remembering even

how I began this poem

let alone when you were angry and

scared me

All just words now and this

is turning out to be

a love letter

to you gone all these years …1

And so it was for me, who only later in life came to feel the love for my father that my teenage blindness had denied me earlier. Hayden’s foster father was a devout Baptist, and his family would go every Sunday morning to church. This is why he would be sure to polish his adopted son’s “good shoes.”

He also encouraged his adopted son in his education. The boy suffered from poor sight and, unable to participate in sports, spent his time reading. He won a scholarship to Detroit City College and went on to study with W. H. Auden at the University of Michigan. Auden was an influential guide in the development of his writing, and Hayden’s first book of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust, appeared in 1940. Hayden achieved international recognition in 1966 when he won the grand prize for poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. In 1976 he became the first African American to take the position of poet laureate. He had traveled a very long and often lonely road from the poverty-stricken black ghetto of Detroit.

“What did I know”: to have this phrase twice at the end of the poem is to cry out in regret at his own ignorance and immaturity—not in self-recrimination, it seems to me, but in wonder at the way youth (and not only youth, but enduring resentment) can obscure the love it has been receiving all along.

The last line of the poem is one of those that can burn itself into the memory for years: “love’s austere and lonely offices.” His father performed love’s offices every day. They were lonely, not affectionate offerings. He loved in the only way he knew how, which was through action and silent service, like so many men. And he received no thanks, no recognition for his labors or evident return of love. But “offices” are surely like that: acts of service undertaken without thought of reward. The word has a religious connotation, suggesting a dedication or submission to a purpose higher than one’s own self-interest.

This poem is itself a kind of office. It is a transparent song of love. It not only soars to wherever his father is now but also includes and redeems through love the narrower and younger Robert Hayden himself. It serves as testimony to the beautiful lines at the end of the poem “An Arundel Tomb,” by Philip Larkin:

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.2

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