Today I do not know what the trees will do—barely believe tomorrowthey will bloom whites & blues, the dogwoodwinking at you.Reed about my waist. Tomorrowsomething will give way—green will crowd the winter out—but today all brown, the sky& ground devour each other, swallowus down. What livesin the buffeting must bend.The cedar out-lasting winter— how it leans, shedslimbs like a soldier.
II. Cardinals
Kevin Young
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“II.Cardinals” from NIGHT WATCH: POEMS by Kevin Young, copyright © 2025 by Kevin Young. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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Melanie Dunea
Melanie Dunea
Kevin Young is the author of sixteen books of poetry and prose, including his most recent, Night Watch. He is the poetry editor of The New Yorker, where he hosts the Poetry Podcast, and the editor of eleven volumes, including A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925-2025 and the acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. He currently serves as the Global Distinguished Professor at New York University.
“A deeply elegiac collection that explores personal grief, collective memory, and American history. . . . Through rich, musical lines, Young blends lyricism and existential inquiry into a powerful meditation on loss and meaning.”
—Electric Literature
“As with his other writing on historical figures, Young plumbs some of the most shameful parts of our nation’s history and society’s violences and holds them up to the light. . . . Yet, above all, Night Watch is a book defined by grief and the existential trembling before the precipice of mortality and how we bear witness to loss.”
—LitHub
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