Tonsure
by Kevin Young
Forever you find
your father
in other faces—
a balding head
or beard enough
to send you following
for blocks after
to make sure
you’re wrong, or buying
some stranger a beer
to share. Well, not
just one—and here,
among a world that mends
only the large things,
let the shadow grow
upon your face
till you feel
at home. It’s all
yours, this father
you make
each day, the one
you became when yours
got yanked away.
Take your place between
the men bowed
at the bar, the beer
warming, glowing faint
as a heart: lit
from within & just
a hint bitter.
About the Author
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. He was awarded a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and later earned an MFA from Brown University. He is the author of many books of poetry, including Brown (2018), Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015, and Book of Hours (2014).
Reflection by Kwame Dawes
The monk’s tonsure is intentional, a shaved bald spot as part of the rituals of sanctification, but here, in his poem, “Tonsure”, Young sees this hereditary marker as a complex sign of the things a man inherits from his father, the difficult, the beautiful, and, most powerfully, the part that repeats itself when he becomes a father, too. Kevin Young’s collections are always an occasion, as is his next book, Stones, (2021) in which this poem appears.
Publication Rights
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2020 by Kevin Young, “Tonsure”, from Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2020. Forthcoming in Stones (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.) Poem reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2022 by The Poetry Foundation.
Post Image
Bernardino Zenale, Saint Anthony of Padua, c. 1507 (detail)
