...or are you just glad to see me?

In honor of New York's 'Poem in Your Pocket Day' today, a poem by Pulitzer Prize Winner Natasha Trethewey, from her book Native Guard











South

Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile. -- E. O. Wilson


I returned to a stand of pines,
bone-thin phalanx

flanking the roadside, tangle
of understory - a dialectic of dark

and light - and magnolias blossoming
like afterthought: each flower

a surrender, white flags draped
among the branches. I returned

to land's end, the swath of coast
clear cut and buried in sand:

mangrove, live oak, gulfweed
razed and replaced by thin palms -

palmettos - symbols of victory
or defiance, over and over

marking this vanquished land. I returned
to a field of cotton, hallowed ground -

as slave legend goes -- each boll
holding the ghosts of generations:

those who measured their days
by the heft of sacks and lengths

of rows, whose sweat flecked the cotton plants
still sewn into our clothes.

I returned to a country battlefield
where colored troops fought and died -

Port Hudson where their black bodies swelled
and blackened beneath the sun - unburied

until earth's green sheet pulled over them,
unmarked by any headstones.

Where the roads, buildings, and monuments
are named to honor the Confederacy,

where that old flag still hangs, I return
to Mississippi, state that made a crime

of me - mulatto, half-breed - native
in my native land, this place they'll bury me.

Native Guard:
Poems by Natasha Trethewey