Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea . .
.
—Allen Tate
We leave Gulfport
at noon; gulls overhead
trailing the
boat—streamers, noisy fanfare—
all the way to
Ship Island. What we see
first is the
fort, its roof of grass, a lee—
half reminder of
the men who served there—
a weathered
monument to some of the dead.
Inside we follow
the ranger, hurried
though we are to
get to the beach. He tells
of graves lost in
the Gulf, the island split
in half when
Hurricane Camille hit,
shows us
casemates, cannons, the store that sells
souvenirs, tokens
of history long buried.
The Daughters of
the Confederacy
has placed a
plaque here, at the fort’s entrance—
each Confederate
soldier’s name raised hard
in bronze; no
names carved for the Native Guards—
2nd Regiment,
Union men, black phalanx.
What is monument
to their legacy?
All the grave
markers, all the crude headstones—
water-lost. Now
fish dart among their bones,
and we listen for
what the waves intone.
Only the fort
remains, near forty feet high,
round,
unfinished, half open to the sky,
the
elements—wind, rain—God’s deliberate eye.
------------------------------------------------
Flounder
BY NATASHA
TRETHEWEY
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
BY NATASHA
TRETHEWEY
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.
Natasha
Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey was born on April 26, 1966, in Gulfport,
Mississippi. She earned an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University
and M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts.
Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (Graywolf
Press, 2000), was selected by Rita Dove as the
winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first
book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi
Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith
Award for Poetry.
Since then, she has published three more collections of poetry,
including Thrall (Houghton Mifflin, 2012); Native
Guard (Houghton
Mifflin, 2006), which received the Pulitzer Prize for
Poetry; and Bellocq’s
Ophelia (Graywolf Press,
2002).
In her introduction to Domestic Work, Rita Dove said,
“Trethewey eschews the Polaroid instant, choosing to render the
unsuspecting yearnings and tremulous hopes that accompany our most
private thoughts—reclaiming for us that interior life where the
true self flourishes and to which we return, in solitary reverie,
for strength.”
Trethewey’s honors include the Bunting Fellowship from the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim
Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She is the Robert W.
Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory
University.
In 2012, Trethewey was named as both the State Poet Laureate of
Mississippi and the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of
Congress. In 2013, she was appointed for a second term and, like
those poets laureate who served a second term before her, she will
undertake a signature project. Trethewey plans to travel to cities
and towns across the country meeting with the general public to
seek out the many ways poetry lives in American communities and
report on her discoveries in a regular feature on the PBS NewsHour
Poetry Series.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Thrall (Houghton Mifflin, 2012)
Native Guard (Houghton
Mifflin, 2006)
Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf Press,
2002)
Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000
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