Benediction

ISSUE: Fall 2009

I thought that when I saw my brother
walking through the gates of the prison,
he would look like a man entering

his life. And he did. He carried
a small bag, holding it away from his body
as if he would not touch it, or

that it weighed almost nothing.
The clothes he wore seemed to belong
to someone else, like hand-me-downs

given a child who will one day
grow into them. Behind him, at the fence,
the inmates were waving, someone saying

all right now. And then,
my brother was walking toward us,
a few awkward steps, at first, until

he got it—how to hold up the too-big pants
with one hand, and in the other
carry everything else he had.

In Verse is supported by Public Radio Makers Quest 2.0, an initiative of AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio. This project is made possible with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by a broadcast partnership with Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.

Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey, a VQR contributing editor, served two terms as the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (HMH, 2018), which was longlisted for the National Book Award; Thrall (HMH, 2012); Native Guard (Mariner, 2007), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002); and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000), which 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. Trethewey is also the author of the memoir Memorial Drive (Ecco, 2020). She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Joshua Cogan

Joshua Cogan is a documentary photographer and anthropologist based in Washington, DC. His work for LiveHopeLove.com, based on his photojournalism alongside writer Kwame Dawes for “Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica” (VQR, Spring 2008) was the winner of a News and Documentary Emmy Award and the Webby People’s Voice award.