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Column 605

Housekeeping

Intro by Ted Kooser
10.23.2016

Begin­ning writ­ers often tell me their real lives aren’t inter­est­ing enough to write about, but the mere act of shap­ing a poem lifts its sub­ject mat­ter above the ordi­nary. Here’s Natasha Trethewey, who served two terms as U. S. Poet Lau­re­ate, illus­trat­ing just what I’ve described. It’s from her book Domes­tic Work, from Gray­wolf Press. Trethewey lives in Georgia. 

Housekeeping

We mourn the broken things, chair legs
wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,
the threadbare clothes. We work the magic
of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.
We save what we can, melt small pieces
of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones
for soup. Beating rugs against the house,
we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading
across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw
the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs
out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.
I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,
listen for passing cars. All day we watch
for the mail, some news from a distant place.

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We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2000 by Natasha Trethewey, “Housekeeping,” from Domestic Work, (Graywolf Press, 2000). Poem reprinted by permission of Natasha Trethewey and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.