![Thrall](https://img.perlego.com/book-covers/3185745/9780547840420_300_450.webp)
Thrall
Poems
Natasha Trethewey
- 96 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Thrall
Poems
Natasha Trethewey
About This Book
The stunning follow-up volume to Natasha Trethewey's Pulitzer Prizeāwinning Native Guard, by the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States. Natasha Trethewey's poems are at once deeply personal and historicalāexploring her own interracial and complicated rootsāand utterly American, connecting them to ours. The daughter of a black mother and white father, a student of history and of the Deep South, she is inspired by everything from colonial paintings of mulattos and mestizos to the stories of people forgotten by history. Meditations on captivity, knowledge, and inheritance permeate Thrall, as she reflects on a series of small estrangements from her poet father and comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America. Thrall confirms not only that Natasha Trethewey is one of our most gifted and necessary poets but that she is also one of our most brilliant and fearless.
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![](OPS/images/part1-plgo-compressed.webp)
Elegy
For my father
I think by now the river must be thick
Ā Ā Ā Ā with salmon. Late August, I imagine it
as it was that morning: drizzle needling
Ā Ā Ā Ā the surface, mist at the banks like a net
settling around usāeverything damp
Ā Ā Ā Ā and shining. That morning, awkward
and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked
Ā Ā Ā Ā into the current and found our placesā
you upstream a few yards and out
Ā Ā Ā Ā far deeper. You must remember how
the river seeped in over your boots
Ā Ā Ā Ā and you grew heavier with that defeat.
All day I kept turning to watch you, how
Ā Ā Ā Ā first you mimed our guideās casting
then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky
Ā Ā Ā Ā between us; and later, rod in hand, how
you triedāagain and againāto find
Ā Ā Ā Ā that perfect arc, flight of an insect
skimming the riverās surface. Perhaps
Ā Ā Ā Ā you recall I cast my line and reeled in
two small trout we could not keep.
Ā Ā Ā Ā Because I had to release them, I confess,
I thought about the pastāworking
Ā Ā Ā Ā the hooks loose, the fish writhing
in my hands, each one slipping away
Ā Ā Ā Ā before I could let go. I can tell you now
that I tried to take it all in, record it
Ā Ā Ā Ā for an elegy Iād writeāone dayā
when the time came. Your daughter,
Ā Ā Ā Ā I was that ruthless. What does it matter
if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting
Ā Ā Ā Ā your line, and when it did not come back
empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights,
Ā Ā Ā Ā dreaming, I step again into the small boat
that carried us out and watch the bank recedingā
Ā Ā Ā Ā my back to where I know we are headed.
![](OPS/images/part2-plgo-compressed.webp)
Miracle of the Black Leg
Pictorial representations of the physician-saints Cosmas and Damian and the myth of the miracle transplantāblack donor, white recipientādate back to the mid-fourteenth century, appearing much later than written versions of the story.
1.
Always, the dark body hewn asunder; always
one man is healed, his sick limb replaced,
placed in the other manās grave: the white leg
buried beside the corpse or attached as if
it were always there. If not for the dark appendage
you might miss the story beneath this storyā
what remains each time the myth changes: how,
in one version, the doctors harvest the leg
from a man, four days dead, in his tomb at the church
of a martyr, orāin anotherādesecrate a body
fresh in the graveyard at Saint Peter in Chains:
there was buried just today an Ethiopian.
Even now, it stays with us: when we mean to uncover
the truth, we dig, say unearth.
2.
Emblematic in paint, a signifier of the bodyās lacuna,
the black leg is at once a grafted narrative,
a redacted line of text, and in this scene a dark stocking
pulled above the knee. Here the patient is sleeping,
his head at rest in his hand. Beatific, he looks as if
heāll wake from a dream. On the floor
beside the bed, a dead Moorāhands crossed at the groin,
the swapped limb white and rotting, fused in place.
And in the ...
Table of contents
- Title Page
- Contents
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Part I
- Elegy
- Part II
- Miracle of the Black Leg
- On Captivity
- Taxonomy
- Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus; or, The Mulata
- Knowledge
- Part III
- The Americans
- Mano Prieta
- De EspaƱol y Negra; Mulata
- Mythology
- Geography
- Torna AtrƔs
- Bird in the House
- Artifact
- Fouled
- Rotation
- Part IV
- Thrall
- Calling
- Enlightenment
- How the Past Comes Back
- On Happiness
- Vespertina Cognitio
- Illumination
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Read More from Natasha Trethewey
- About the Author
- Connect with HMH