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By Natasha Trethewey

I am four in this photograph, standing   
on a wide strip of Mississippi beach,   
my hands on the flowered hips


of a bright bikini. My toes dig in,   
curl around wet sand. The sun cuts   
the rippling Gulf in flashes with each   


tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet
glinting like switchblades. I am alone
except for my grandmother, other side   


of the camera, telling me how to pose.   
It is 1970, two years after they opened   
the rest of this beach to us,   


forty years since the photograph   
where she stood on a narrow plot   
of sand marked colored, smiling,


her hands on the flowered hips   
of a cotton meal-sack dress.


Natasha Trethewey, “History Lesson” from Domestic Work. Copyright © 2000 by Natasha Tretheway. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

Source: Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000)

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Poet Bio

Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, the daughter of poet, professor, and Canadian emigrant Eric Trethewey and social worker Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough. The daughter of a mixed-race marriage, Trethewey experienced her parents’ divorce when she was six. She subsequently spent time in Atlanta, Georgia, with her mother and in New Orleans, Louisiana, with her father. Trethewey explores the lives and jobs of working-class people, particularly black men and women in the South and is adept at combining the personal and the historical in her work. Her third book of poems, Native Guard (2006), won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. The book contains elegies to her mother, who died while Trethewey was in college, and a sonnet sequence in the voice of a black soldier fighting in the Civil War. See More By This Poet

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