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By Kevin Young

I hunted heaven

for him.


No dice.


Too uppity,

it was. Not enough


music, or dark dirt.


I begged the earth empty

of him. Death


believes in us whether

we believe


or not. For a long while

I watch the sound


of a boy bouncing a ball

down the block


take its time

to reach me. Father,


find me when

you want. I’ll wait.


Source: Poetry (September 2011)

  • Living
  • Relationships
  • Religion

Poet Bio

Kevin Young
Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. He studied under Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido at Harvard University and, while a student there, became a member of the Dark Room Collective, a community of African American writers. “I feel like a poem is made up of poetic and unpoetic language, or unexpected language,” Young said in a 2006 interview with Ploughshares. “I think there are many other vernaculars, whether it’s the vernacular of the blues, or the vernacular of visual art, the sort of living language of the everyday.” For roughly a decade, Young was the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. Young is the poetry editor of the New Yorker and the director of New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

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