#MIDDLEBURY
Imperatives for Carrying on in the Aftermath
Natasha Trethewey
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.
Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that,
more often, a woman who chooses to leave
is then murdered. The hundredth time
your father says, But she hated violence,
why would she marry a guy like that? –
don’t waste your breath explaining, again,
how abusers wait, are patient, that they
don’t beat you on the first date, sometimes
not even the first few years of a marriage.
Keep an impassive face whenever you hear
Stand by Your Man, and let go your rage
when you recall those words were advice
given your mother. Try to forget the first
trial, before she was dead, when the charge
was only attempted murder; don’t belabor
the thinking or the sentence that allowed
her ex-husband’s release a year later, or
the juror who said, It’s a domestic issue –
they should work it out themselves. Just
breathe when, after you read your poems
about grief, a woman asks: Do you think
your mother was weak for men? Learn
to ignore subtext. Imagine a thought-
cloud above your head, dark and heavy
with the words you cannot say; let silence
rain down. Remember you were told
by your famous professor, that you should
write about something else, unburden
yourself of the death of your mother and
just pour your heart out in the poems.
Ask yourself what’s in your heart, that
reliquary-blood locket and seed-bed – and
contend with what it means, the folk-saying
you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul:
that one does not bury the mother’s body
in the ground but in the chest, or – like you –
you carry her corpse on your back.
About this poem
“I have lived in the aftermath of losing my mother for 31 years. Carrying that grief, that wound, is one of the reasons I am a poet.” – Natasha Trethewey
About Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey’s most recent book is “Thrall” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). She is the Robert W. Woodruff professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Natasha Trethewey. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
