During the month of March, as part of the Slice of Life Challenge and the Stafford Challenge, I’m writing Cento poems all month by taking the lines of poetry from living poets and weaving them into a new poem. Today, I’m celebrating Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet who served as our 19th US Poet Laureate and Mississippi Poet Laureate.
You can read more about Natasha Trethewey at her website and in an interview here and here.
What Happened Next
In 1959, my mother is boarding a train
From every corner of the photograph, flags wave down
The lines of my young father’s face deepen
what’s left is footage: the hours before
Behind us, the skyline of Atlanta
Taken from: The Southern Crescent; Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi; Southern Gothic; Providence; Pastoral.
I’ve also used her poetry in the past to inspire other forms, such as Golden Shovels, which use a line vertically to become the beginning or ending words of the lines in the poem. You can see an example of a Golden Shovel here. One of the things I love most about the version of Native Guard that I have is that it came with a CD of Natasha Trethewey reading the poems. And yes, my RAV4 is a 2018, old enough to still have ………..(drumroll please)………a CD player!
Common Threads 
If I didn’t have a CD player in my car, how could I play those Beatles CDs on long drives? (2018 VW for me….)
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Amen, and Pandora and Spotify just arenāt the same because some of the far less popular songs are my favorites! Happy Friday!
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Kim,
Weāve finally arrived at a collection I own! No temptation to order another book! Mississippi sure has produced some outstanding writers, Trethway among them. The images in your poem spark a memory on a bus years ago. I need to write about that.
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Thanks, Kim! I now have a stack of KRB – Kim Recommended Books!
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