History Lesson by Natasha Trethewey (2000)
Natasha Trethewey’s History Lesson tells about an important relationship, memory, history, culture, as well as race. [1]
Contents
Poetry
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. [2]
Author
Natasha Trethewey is a daughter of a mixed-race marriage to a poet, professor, and Canadian emigrant Eric Tretheywe and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a social worker. Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, winning the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Native Guard (2006). [3]
Racism Issue
References
- ↑ History Leson. June 9, 2012. Retrieved January 16, 2021
- ↑ Poetry and the Civil Rights Movement. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved January 16, 2021
- ↑ History Lesson. Poetry out Loud. Retrieved January 16, 2021