The words that shadow us

                               by Natasha Trethewey

GRAVEYARD BLUES

It rained the whole time we were laying her down;

Rained from church to grave when we put her down.

The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.

When the preacher called out I held up my hand;

When he called for a witness I raised my hand --

Death stops the body's work, the soul's a journeyman.

The sun came out when I turned to walk away,

Glared down on me as I turned and walked away --

My back to my mother, leaving her where she lay.

The road going home was pocked with holes,

That home-going road's always full of holes;

Though we slow down, time's wheel still rolls.

          I wander now among names of the dead:

          My mother's name, stone pillow for my head.

MISCEGENATION

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;

they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name

begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong -- mis in Mississippi.

A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same

as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.

Faulker's Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name

for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.

My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.

I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.

When I turned 33, my father said, It's your Jesus year -- you're the same

age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.

I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name --

though I'm not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

SOUTHERN GOTHIC

I have lain down in to 1970, into the bed

my parents will share for only a few more years.

Early evening, they have not yet turned from each other

in sleep, their bodies curved -- parentheses

framing the separate lives they'll wake to. Dreaming,

I am again the child with too many questions --

the endless why and why and why

my mother cannot answer, he mouth closed, a gesture

toward her future: cold lips stitched shut.

The lines in my young father's face deepen

toward an expression of grief. I have come home

from the schoolyard with the words that shadow us

in the small Southern town -- peckerwood and nigger

lover; half-breed and zebra -- words that take shape

outside us. We're huddled on the tiny island of bed,

quiet in the language of blood; the house unsteady

on its cinderblock haunches, sinking deeper

into the muck of ancestry. Oil lamps flicker

around us -- our shadows, dark glyphs on the wall,

bigger and stranger than we are.

From Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard: Poems, 2006.