Natasha Trethewey | Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath
In this week's episode of the Get Lit Minute, your weekly poetry podcast, we spotlight the life and work of American poet and spoken-word artist, Natasha Trethewey. A former US poet laureate, Trethewey is the author of five collections of poetry: Monument (2018), Thrall (2012), Native Guard (2006), Bellocq\u2019s Ophelia (2002), and Domestic Work (2000). She is also the author of a book of creative non-fiction: Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010). Source
This episode includes a reading of her poem, \u201cImperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath\u201d, featured in our 2021 Get Lit Anthology.
\u201cImperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath\u201d
Do not hang your head or clench your fists
when even your friend, after hearing the story,
says: My mother would never put up with that.
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Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that,
more often, a woman who chooses to leave
is then murdered. The hundredth time
\xa0
your father says, But she hated violence,
why would she marry a guy like that?\u2014
don\u2019t waste your breath explaining, again,
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how abusers wait, are patient, that they
don\u2019t beat you on the first date, sometimes
not even the first few years of a marriage.
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Keep an impassive face whenever you hear
Stand by Your Man, and let go your rage
when you recall those words were advice
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given your mother. Try to forget the first
trial, before she was dead, when the charge
was only attempted murder; don\u2019t belabor
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the thinking or the sentence that allowed
her ex-husband\u2019s release a year later, or
the juror who said, It\u2019s a domestic issue\u2014
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they should work it out themselves. Just
breathe when, after you read your poems
about grief, a woman asks: Do you think
\xa0
your mother was weak for men? Learn
to ignore subtext. Imagine a thought-
cloud above your head, dark and heavy
\xa0
with the words you cannot say; let silence
rain down. Remember you were told
by your famous professor, that you should
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write about something else, unburden
yourself of the death of your mother and
just pour your heart out in the poems.
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Ask yourself what\u2019s in your heart, that
reliquary\u2014blood locket and seed-bed\u2014and
contend with what it means, the folk-saying
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you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul:
that one does not bury the mother\u2019s body
in the ground but in the chest, or\u2014like you\u2014
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you carry her corpse on your back.
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