Welcome to another series of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner helping organisations build digital empires, poetry advocate, poet and podcaster.

This is the first episode of this series on Fatherhood.

Today's poem is "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden.

For full show notes please visit the podcast page on Substack.

All the poems in this series will be about fathers or by fathers.

They will have something vital to show us about the experience, either of fatherhood itself, or of being a son or daughter of a father.

One of the poems was written in 1603, another in 1800, but most will be from the last 50 years or so. There will be a poem by a star of social media, there will be a poem that is actually a song lyric, and I also — and this is a first for me — will be including one of my own poems in this series, a poem I wrote last year about and for my daughter.

This series will be for men who would like to be able to emulate their own fathers, and also for men who want to become the father they never had.

But it won’t just be for men. Around 60% of the listeners to this podcast over the past 18 months have been women, and all the episodes in this series will be for women too. Because men need women and women need men. We need each other to sustain life, and we need each other to enjoy to the full the life we sustain. At our best, we each bring something different and essential.

So there can be doubt that there are lots of women out there who would like their men — their husbands or partners or the men they would like to meet, the men who are the fathers of their children now or might be in the future — to fully embody the role of father, in all its complexities and challenges and glories.

We all need fathers and father figures in our lives, and maybe now more than ever, with so much immaturity, short-term thinking and lack of leadership in the world. This series of poems will try to bring some of that inspiration and wisdom straight to you.

So thank you for being here. Please enjoy this series of Poems for the Speed of Life, starting on Saturday, June 8th, and if you do, please share one episode with someone who might benefit from hearing it.

See you then.

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For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.

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Music Credit:

MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/Creative Commons CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/