Today’s Thoughtful Thursday (actually, “Thoughtful The Day after Thursday” this week) shines the spotlight on the amazing Kevin Young, aka “One of the Hardest Working men in Poetbiz”. Young was born in 1970 in Lincoln, Nebraska. He received his BA from Harvard University in 1992 and his MFA in creative writing from Brown University in 1996. Young’s awards and honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He has taught at the University of Georgia, Indiana University, and Emory University, where he was the Charles Howard Candler professor of creative writing and English and curator of literary collections at the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. He is currently the director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the poetry editor of The New Yorker.
Here are two poems from Young. “Hive” talks to us about the innocence of children and parent’s hope/fears for them as they go about the business of being little boys, and and “Nightstick [A Mural for Michael Brown]” decries the powers that threaten to (and often do) brutally end this innocence. Share these with your sons and enjoy.
Hive
The honey bees’ exile
is almost complete.
You can carry
them from hive
to hive, the child thought
& that is what
he tried, walking
with them thronging
between his pressed palms.
Let him be right.
Let the gods look away
as always. Let this boy
who carries the entire
actual, whirring
world in his calm
unwashed hands,
barely walking, bear
us all there
buzzing, unstung.
Kevin Young
Nightstick [A Mural for Michael Brown]
There are gods
of fertility,
corn, childbirth,
& police
brutality—this last
is offered praise
& sacrifice
near weekly
& still cannot
be sated—many-limbed,
thin-skinned,
its colors are blue
& black, a cross-
hatch of bruise
& bulletholes
punched out
like my son’s
three-hole notebooks—
pages torn
like lungs, excised
or autopsied, splayed
open on a cold table
or left in the street
for hours to stew.
A finger
is a gun—
a wallet
is a gun, skin
a shiny pistol,
a demon, a barrel
already ready—
hands up
don’t shoot—
arms
not to bear
but bare. Don’t
dare take
a left
into the wrong
skin. Death
is not dark
but a red siren
who will not blow
breath into your open
mouth, arrested
like a heart. Because
I can see
I believe in you, god
of police brutality—
of corn liquor
& late fertility, of birth
pain & blood
like the sun setting,
dispersing its giant
crowd of light.
Kevin Young
