Ledge

No use telling 
         the dead what 
you’ve learned since 

they’ve learnt it too— 

how to go on 
         without you, the mercy 
of morning, or moving, 

         the light that persists 
even if. 

✶ 

Beauty is as beauty 
         does, my mother says, 
who is beautiful & speaks 

loud so she can be understood 
         unlike poets who can’t 
talk to save their lives 

so they write. 

✶ 

It’s like a language, 
         loss— 
can be  

         learned only 
by living—there— 

✶ 

What anchors us 
         to this thirst 
& earth, its threats 

& thinnesses— 
         its ways of waning 
& making the most of—

of worse & much 
         worse—if not 
this light lifting 

up over the ridge

Copyright © 2023 by Kevin Young. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 28, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“‘Ledge’ is taken from a longer poetic sequence inspired by Dante [Alighieri]. My friend and fellow poet Robin Coste Lewis and I divided up ‘The Inferno’ and wrote our respective versions after I was asked by the Museum of Modern Art to respond to Robert Rauschenberg’s drawings based on ‘The Inferno,’ which a friend had read to the artist canto by canto, circle by circle. I happened to have grown up with the same John Ciardi translation that Rauschenberg heard and, in composing my cantos, incorporated the Dante I first encountered as a teenager, together with African American cosmologies and spirituals that grounded me. Without telling a soul, after the initial project I continued to write through the rest of The Divine Comedy. As its title suggests, ‘Ledge’ is from the ‘Purgatory’ section, which, in our current era of social and bodily strife—not unlike Dante’s own time—manages to offer some hard-won hope.”
—Kevin Young