By Kevin Young
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.
--------
The final poem in the poet's new collection, which "takes up boyhood and brownness, moving through Kansas and the South," he tells Poets.org. "In this boy remembered or imagined, the poem offering a kind of winged benediction -- a song that summons suffering, but does not succumb, I hope."
Alice had an appointment at Walter Reed on Friday morning, so after she was finished, she and Avery came over for an early lunch at Cava with me, Maddy, and Daniel (Adam sent photos from Israel of art by David Friedman, whose work I have loved for years, whom it turned out he met at a talk on Kabbalah at his studio). Maddy went to work, Avery and I went to a Pokemon raid, we stopped at CVS and Starbucks for sustenance and whey protein, eventually Alice went home.
Daniel worked out in the afternoon while I screamed on the phone at CVS Caremark literally for two hours because their policies when one gets new insurance are beyond ridiculous, and when Paul got home, we went to dinner at my parents' before going to see I, Tonya, which is wonderful -- great acting, touches all the feminist and class issues bound up in coverage of Harding's story without trying to idealize her. From Thomas Edison's library in West Orange, New Jersey:
No comments:
Post a Comment