My Father, The Poet

One of the benefits of climbing into a pulpit week after week is the discipline of writing and speaking. My father, The Reverend Stanley C. F. Hayes, added another aspect to his preaching by writing poetry. The poems were often four or eight lines, usually in a quatrain form.

Many of them are in his hand writing, jotted down as time permitted and the muse moved. Here is one in typewritten form. Written in January of 1955 while we lived in Marshfield, Wisconsin, it is a reminder of the years when writers depended on typewriters to advance and preserve the words that they wrote.

The family in 1955 -- Penny, Wanda, Tim, Carla. Mary, not in photo

I would have been almost seven years old when Dad wrote this. There were five of us Hayes kids -- Wanda, Carla, Tim, Penny, Mary -- by then, so Mom would have been involved in guiding the very young family through each day's waking and eating and sleeping times.

I remember that on Saturdays Dad would head to his study in the church basement where we could find him busy at his desk with its typewriter. Saturday was when he finalized the week's thoughts and polished the manuscript for his Sunday sermon. Often he wrote a poem that formed the focus for the weekly sermon.

Dad had a black chunky typewriter that was moved to the middle of the desk so he could convert a longhand draft into a typewritten manuscript. He'd welcome a visit from any one of us when he was working. I don't ever remember being shooed away from the basement study that was filled with shelves with books and paper, his desk with pencils, pens and photos, and houseplants in the high basement ground level windows.

Dad's poety was published as Behind The Plow,  a poetry collection that my sister Heidi edited. Heidi and Dad worked from Dad's files and were able to compile a small volume of poety that is representative of a body of work that spans more than six decades of writing and preaching. Released in 2006, this book is a testament to the discipline of weekly writing that Dad followed for most of his adult years as a preacher and pastor.

Copyright 2012
Wanda Hayes Eichler