This content was published: January 18, 2022. Phone numbers, email addresses, and other information may have changed.
Two Deep Breaths: A Young Man
by Caitlin Dwyer
I recently became a mom for the second time. My four-year-old son loves to make his baby sister laugh. He clowns for her, sticking out his tongue and stamping his feet. When she cries, he rushes to her crib to soothe her. He warns me when she鈥檚 too close to the edge of the couch or reaching for something she shouldn鈥檛. One unexpected joy of having two kids is watching the relationship between them grow, including the protectiveness of an older sibling for a younger.
My kids are white; the kids in 鈥檚 鈥淎 Young Man鈥 are not. For Brown, that changes everything. In his poem, Brown examines how the older son鈥檚 protectiveness toward his younger sister is suddenly seen as a danger, rather than a sweet sibling bond. In a society that sees young men of color as threats, the innocent boy鈥檚 鈥渟wagger鈥 on the playground becomes horrific harbinger for the future: one day, someone will see that boy鈥檚 anger as threat and put him in prison.
The narrator loves his children. He admires his son, maybe is even a little jealous of the way he acts 鈥渓ike a bodyguard鈥 for his sister. Maybe fears it a little. 鈥淭hey are so small,鈥 he says. The siblings are ignorant that their playground anger and love for each other could ever be threatening. They鈥檙e just kids. He writes,
“They play. He is not yet incarcerated.”
Brown tears out my heart with that 鈥測et鈥 in the final line. Skillfully rhyming 鈥渞ed鈥 and 鈥渋ncarcerated,鈥 he creates a sense of inevitability, like a door slamming shut. But he also opens up hope: the boy is still innocent, still free, 鈥渘ot yet鈥 an adult with the burdens of the adult world on him.
I read this poem on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day of action and reflection. Reading 鈥淎 Young Man鈥 got me thinking about Dr. King鈥檚 words in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech: 鈥淚 have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.鈥 As Brown鈥檚 poem shows, we haven鈥檛 yet become that nation. Poems like this can remind us how far we still have to go, and why it matters to keep trying.
A reading tip: Look at the shape of a poem. Like, literally, observe the distribution of ink and white space on the page. Is the shape wide, skinny, long, short? Are there fat bunches of words or skinny bunches? Are there patterns in the way the lines are distributed, perhaps groups of two or three or four lines together? Different shapes have different effects on us. What does this poem鈥檚 shape do for you as a reader?
A Young Man
We stand together on our block, me and my son,
Neighbors saying our face is the same, but I know
He鈥檚 better than me: when other children move
Toward my daughter, he lurches like a brother
Meant to put them down. He is a bodyguard
On the playground. He won鈥檛 turn apart from her,
Empties any enemy, leaves them flimsy, me
Confounded. I never fought for so much 鈥
I calmed my daughter when I could cradle
My daughter; my son swaggers about her.
He won鈥檛 have to heal a girl he won鈥檛 let free.
They are so small. And I, still, am a young man.
In him lives my black anger made red.
They play. He is not yet incarcerated.听
Jericho Brown听is author of the听听听(Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the听recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.