Poem for the day: I shall be released (Kevin Young)

Thanks to the Poetry Daily weekly newsletter that directed me to this extraordinary poem from Kevin Young:


I shall be released

What we love
    will leave us

or is it
    we leave

what we love,
    I forget—

Today, belly
    full enough

to walk the block
    after all week

too cold
    outside to smile—

I think of you, warm
    in your underground room

reading the book
    of bone. It's hard going—

your body a dead
    language—

I've begun
    to feel, if not

hope then what
    comes just after—

or before—
    Let's not call it

regret, but
    this weight,

or weightlessness,
    or just

plain waiting.
    The ice wanting

again water.
    The streams of two planes

a cross fading.

I was so busy
    telling you this I forgot

to mention the sky—
    how in the dusk

its steely edges
    have just begun to rust.

Kevin Young

Dear Darkness
Alfred A. Knopf