Nightstick [A Mural for Michael Brown]

Kevin Young - 1970-

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's poetry collections include Brown (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018) and Book of Hours (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), winner of the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.

Themes

About This Poem

“The continued if not continuous mistaking of shower heads, stray cigarettes, wallets, and black bodies for instruments of violence—or rather as excuses for violence against black people—haunts this poem. It was first written years ago but never could find its way until it became the last of a ‘Triptych for Trayvon Martin,’ memorializing and muralizing several figures who galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement. Found in my book Brown, juxtaposed with poems of history both personal and public, ‘Nightstick’ serves as a kind of chant, the reversal of a curse that endangers us all.”
—Kevin Young

Waking early with the warming house my grandmother knew what to do taking care not to wake Da Da she cooked up a storm in darkness adding silent spices and hot sauce to stay cool. She ate later, alone after the children had been gathered and made to eat her red eggs. Da Da rose late, long after the roosters had crowed his name, clearing an ashy throat pulling on long wooly underwear to make him sweat even more. The fields have gone long enough without water he liked to say, so can I and when he returned pounds heavier from those thirsty fields he was even cooler losing each soaked woolen skin to the floor, dropping naked rain in his wife’s earthen arms.

I go with the team also. —Whitman These are the last days my television says. Tornadoes, more rain, overcast, a chance of sun but I do not trust weathermen, never have. In my fridge only the milk makes sense— expires. No one, much less my parents, can tell me why my middle name is Lowell, and from my table across from the Confederate Monument to the dead (that pale finger bone) a plaque declares war—not Civil, or Between the States, but for Southern Independence. In this café, below sea- and eye-level a mural runs the wall, flaking, a plantation scene most do not see— it's too much around the knees, height of a child. In its fields Negroes bend to pick the endless white. In livery a few drive carriages like slaves, whipping the horses, faces blank and peeling. The old hotel lobby this once was no longer welcomes guests—maroon ledger, bellboys gone but for this. Like an inheritance the owner found it stripping hundred years (at least) of paint and plaster. More leaves each day. In my movie there are no horses, no heroes, only draftees fleeing into the pines, some few who survive, gravely wounded, lying burrowed beneath the dead— silent until the enemy bayonets what is believed to be the last of the breathing. It is getting later. We prepare for wars no longer there. The weather inevitable, unusual— more this time of year than anyone ever seed. The earth shudders, the air— if I did not know better, I would think we were living all along a fault. How late it has gotten . . . Forget the weatherman whose maps move, blink, but stay crossed with lines none has seen. Race instead against the almost rain, digging beside the monument (that giant anchor) till we strike water, sweat fighting the sleepwalking air.

To allow silence To admit it in us always moving Just past senses, the darkness What swallows us and we live amongst What lives amongst us * These grim anchors That brief sanctity the sea Cast quite far when you seek —in your hats black and kerchiefs— to bury me * Do not weep but once, and a long time then Thereafter eat till your stomach spills over No more! you'll cry too full for your eyes to leak * The words will wait * Place me in a plain pine box I have been for years building It is splinters not silver It is filled of hair * Even the tongues of bells shall still * You who will bear my body along Spirit me into the six Do not startle at its lack of weight How light

Poems

Nightstick [A Mural for Michael Brown]

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Poems

Nightstick [A Mural for Michael Brown]

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