Natasha Trethewey’s poems are deeply rooted in history, memory, and identity. As a biracial woman from the American South, her work often explores the complexities of race, heritage, and personal loss. Through collections like Native Guard and Domestic Work, she blends personal narrative with historical voices, uncovering forgotten or silenced stories of African Americans. Her poetry is known for its clear language, emotional depth, and meticulous attention to detail. Trethewey often uses imagery of the South—its landscapes, monuments, and shadows of slavery—to reflect on how the past continues to shape the present. Her voice is both intimate and political, weaving together private grief and collective history. With a tone that is reflective yet powerful, Trethewey transforms pain into remembrance and injustice into art, making her one of the most significant contemporary American poets.
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| Natasha trethewey |
Duty
When he tells the story now
he's at the center of it,
everyone else in the house
falling into the backdrop—
my mother, grandmother,
an uncle, all dead now—props
in our story: father and daughter
caught in memory's half-light.
I'm too young to recall it,
so his story becomes the story:
1969, Hurricane Camille
bearing down, the old house
shuddering as if it will collapse.
Rain pours into every room
and he has to keep moving,
keep me out of harm's way—
a father's first duty: to protect.
And so, in the story, he does:
I am small in his arms, perhaps
even sleeping. Water is rising
around us and there is no
higher place he can take me
than this, memory forged
in the storm's eye: a girl
clinging to her father. What
can I do but this? Let him
tell it again and again as if
it's always been only us,
and that, when it mattered,
he was the one who saved me.
Flounder
Here, she said, put this on your head.
She handed me a hat.
You ’bout as white as your dad,
and you gone stay like that.
Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down
around each bony ankle,
and I rolled down my white knee socks
letting my thin legs dangle,
circling them just above water
and silver backs of minnows
flitting here then there between
the sun spots and the shadows.
This is how you hold the pole
to cast the line out straight.
Now put that worm on your hook,
throw it out and wait.
She sat spitting tobacco juice
into a coffee cup.
Hunkered down when she felt the bite,
jerked the pole straight up
reeling and tugging hard at the fish
that wriggled and tried to fight back.
A flounder, she said, and you can tell
’cause one of its sides is black.
The other side is white, she said.
It landed with a thump.
I stood there watching that fish flip-flop,
switch sides with every jump.
History Lesson
I am four in this photograph, standing
on a wide strip of Mississippi beach,
my hands on the flowered hips
of a bright bikini. My toes dig in,
curl around wet sand. The sun cuts
the rippling Gulf in flashes with each
tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet
glinting like switchblades. I am alone
except for my grandmother, other side
of the camera, telling me how to pose.
It is 1970, two years after they opened
the rest of this beach to us,
forty years since the photograph
where she stood on a narrow plot
of sand marked colored, smiling,
her hands on the flowered hips
of a cotton meal-sack dress.
Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath
Do not hang your head or clench your fists
when even your friend, after hearing the story,
says, My mother would never put up with that.
Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that,
more often, a woman who chooses to leave
is then murdered. The hundredth time
your father says, But she hated violence,
why would she marry a guy like that?—
don't waste your breath explaining, again,
how abusers wait, are patient, that they
don't beat you on the first date, sometimes
not even the first few years of a marriage.
Keep an impassive face whenever you hear
Stand By Your Man, and let go your rage
when you recall those words were advice
given your mother. Try to forget the first
trial, before she was dead, when the charge
was only attempted murder; don't belabor
the thinking or the sentence that allowed
her ex-husband's release a year later, or
the juror who said, It's a domestic issue—
they should work it out themselves. Just
breathe when, after you read your poems
about grief, a woman asks, Do you think
your mother was weak for men? Learn
to ignore subtext. Imagine a thought-
cloud above your head, dark and heavy
with the words you cannot say; let silence
rain down. Remember you were told,
by your famous professor, that you should
write about something else, unburden
yourself of the death of your mother and
just pour your heart out in the poems.
Ask yourself what's in your heart, that
reliquary—blood locket and seedbed—and
contend with what it means, the folk saying
you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul:
that one does not bury the mother's body
in the ground but in the chest, or—like you —
you carry her corpse on your back.
