Time and Space and Poetry by Natasha Trethewey

Theories of Time and Space
by Natasha Trethewey

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion – dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp – buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry – tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph – who you were –
will be waiting when you return

Hear Natasha Tretheway read her poems at the following Academy of American
Poets National Poetry Month event:

April 11
Michael Collier, Natasha Tretheway, and David Tucker
Co-sponsored by Houghton Mifflin and Poets House
Poets House, 72 Spring Street
New York, NY
7 p.m $5 general admission, free to Poets House and Academy members

Poetry.org

Poet Natasha Trethewey is a Professor at Emory. She was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. During the 2005-2006 academic year, Trethewey is the Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her third collection of poems, Native Guard, is forthcoming in March 2006 from Houghton Mifflin.

Read another poem by Natasha at http://www.creativewriting.emory.edu/faculty/trethewey.html