I am so very grateful that the Well-Read Mom Year of the Father begins with poetry. I do realize that poetry is not everyone’s jam. And I’m not grateful in the sense that I gain some weird didactic pleasure from others’ discomfort (as my students sometimes posit). I’m grateful because I need all of the help I can get. I need help in paying attention to my life.

When I am lent the eyes of a poet, I am lifted back into a posture of attention. This change in posture, this correction, can sometimes be painful to my heart. What have I been missing? What have I been doing? Perhaps this is why I often can’t make it through a poem without crying! Yes, the poet truly stops and looks. Notices. Pays attention. And in doing so, draws me up, wipes clean my mottled eyes, and invites me to look too.

I am invited to look at my present life and sift through the past with a new set of lenses. In the case of this year’s poetry, I was given the gift to consider my father. For me, Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” is a beckoning of memory. There were many cold nights in the biting prairie winters of Kansas. I would often awaken to the flue opening below my bedroom and the muted bass of the dying embers being stoked back into life. What a comforting memory of my dad’s presence, quietly keeping us warm in the home that he toiled and worked to provide for us. This poem led me down a lane of beautiful recollections that I had not thought of in years, and they turned into prayers of thanksgiving for my father. 

And isn’t that what good poetry should do? As with all true art, should it not remind us that we are in relationship with an Other? Mary Oliver so succinctly addresses this very topic in her beloved poem “The Summer Day”.

I am excited to delve into this year’s work together. I’m full of hope that our reading will lead to many enriching conversations, deepened friendships, greater attention, and, hopefully, many prayers.