Uncles (Blood) by Kevin Young
Uncles (Blood)
Kevin YoungTalk turns
to who has the sugar
& how much water
you should drink a day,
to conspiracy theories—cornbread
can kill you—Uncles give advice
not gifts. They forget
your birthday but recall
how short you once were
forever. In your mind
they always loom tallereven years after bumping you
the Bar-Kays from an 8-track—
all bass & bucket seats
in the souped-up black Camaro
parked in the yard
they mean to mow.Uncles will build half
a house, the frame, the place
the plumbing will go, all
beam & bone,
& never finish the wallstill one day the rain will
rot it all.
Uncles got plans
& they’re big.
Uncles underestimateeverything but food, buy
in bulk then watch it
go bad. Uncles heal
with a touch & can fry
turkeys whole. Uncles smoke
menthols & speakprophecy. Will lift
you above their head,
bad backs & all—will jerry-rig
a motor to an old-fashioned
lawnmower to slaythe weeds. Will lie
down after, exhausted,
prone on Mama’s couch,
refusing to seeno doctor-dragged in
lucky, Doc’ll say, hours before
shrapnel from some unseen
mowed-over tin
was about to boreinto their huge hearts.
Uncles lie
beautifully. Years later
Uncles won’t much remember—
instead show you their watchthat’s stopped—It’s ghetto,
they’ll laugh, flashing teeth
more gold than their timepiece
that’s a copy
of a copy of a copy—
the battery run downbut still worn, still shiny.
SELECTED BY ANIS MOJGANI
I love Kevin Young’s poetry collection, Dear Darkness, which centers on his father’s passing and the ties of family and place. And some of the poems I love in particular are the ones of speaking to and on specific family relationships like his poems for aunties and cousins. He has two for uncles––one being non-blood uncles and the other for blood ones.
I love all four of these poems, and chose to share “Uncles (Blood)”, I think largely in thinking on how poems can so resonate with one the same ways by way of different reasons, and how also sometimes poems find us by way of our not yet arrived futures.
I first read “Uncles (Blood)” so very many years ago and it held such truth to me, even with some of the uncles that I have being so different than the ones spoken to in Kevin’s poem here, and still things rang so true and loud as it hit against my heart—in the poem I saw both my uncles I grew up with and also my uncles I did not see often, and it allowed me to hold all of them in the same way.
In reading the poem later in life, when I too had become an uncle, I saw myself on the other side of that word. And in doing so was able to also give grace to my own love that I have for my siblings’ children, in spite of the times in which I feel I am not the uncle to them I so desire to be. Give grace to the uncle I am and the one I’ll be, and a grace again, more greatly, to the ones who are mine.
ABOUT ANIS MOJGANI
Anis Mojgani served two terms as Oregon’s 10th Poet Laureate, is a two-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, and the author of six poetry collections and an opera libretto. A poet and artist, his first picture book is forthcoming from Holiday House/Neal Porter Books. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Dear Darkness by Kevin Young, published by Knopf, 2008. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“Las Vegas, Nashville, despair, the Midwest, “Bar-B-Q Heaven” and his family’s Louisiana home: these are the American places that Kevin Young visits in his powerful, heartfelt sixth book of poetry. Begun as a reflection on family and memory, Dear Darkness became a book of elegies after the sudden death of the poet’s father, a violent event that silenced Young with grief until he turned to rhapsodizing about the food that has sustained him and his Louisiana family for decades. Flavorful, yet filled with sadness, these stunningly original odes—to gumbo, hot sauce, crawfish, and even homemade wine—travel adeptly between slow-cooked tradition and a new direction, between everyday living and transcendent sorrow.
As in his prizewinning Jelly Roll, Young praises and grieves in one breath, paying homage to his significant clan—to “aunties” and “double cousins” and a great-grandfather’s grave in a segregated cemetery—even as he mourns. His blues expand to include a series of poems contemplating the deaths of Johnny Cash, country rocker Gram Parsons, and a host of family members lost in the past few years. Burnished by loss and a hard-won humor, he delivers poems that speak to our cultural griefs even as he buries his own. “Sadder than / a wedding dress / in a thrift store,” these are poems which grow out of hunger and pain but find a way to satisfy both; Young counts his losses and our blessings, knowing “inside / anything can sing.”” (Source)
ABOUT KEVIN YOUNG
Kevin Young, born in 1970, received his BA from Harvard University in 1992. Young’s poetry collections include Night Watch, Stones, which was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize; Brown; Book of Hours, winner of the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; To Repel Ghosts, which was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; and Most Way Home. In 2020, Young was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is also currently the director of… (more)
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ENDNOTES
- This is Day 86 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: family • memory • mortality • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
