Natasha Trethewey

Poetry cannot fail, yet the role of poetry waxes and wanes in the lives of many people. We turn to it when we need it.

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs
at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:
his forehead white with illumination—

He has the surname that suggests
a contested kinship: Jefferson—

Somewhere in the post-Katrina wreckage and disarray of my grandmother’s house, there is a photograph of my brother Joe and me, our arms around each other’s shoulders. We are at a long-gone nightclub in Gulfport, the Terrace Lounge, standing before the photographer’s airbrushed scrim—a border of dice and playing cards around us. Just above our heads the words HIGH ROLLERS, in cursive, embellished—if I am remembering this right—with tiny starbursts. 

Here is North Gulfport—
its liquor stores and car washes,

This week they are painting
the North Gulfport water tower.

At first, there was nothing to do but watch.
For days, before the trucks arrived, before the work
of clean-up, my brother sat on the stoop and watched.

The house is in need of repair, but is—
for now, she says—still hers. After the storm,
she laid hands on what she could reclaim:

On Saturday, when I come to see
my brother, they call him, over loudspeaker,
to the tower—a small guardroom

Once, I was a daughter of this place:
daughter of Gwen, granddaughter
of Leretta, great of Eugenia McGee.

I wanted to say I have come home
to bear witness, to read the sign
emblazoned on the church marquee—

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

We tell the story every year—
how we peered from the windows, shades drawn—
though nothing really happened,
the charred grass now green again.