History Lesson (Monday Poem)

by Natasha Trethewey

 

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.

from Domestic Work by Natasha Tretheway.

Graywolf Press, 2000

 

Here's an Ocean Tale (Monday Poem)

by Kwoya Fagin Maples

 

My brother still bites his nails to the quick,
but lately he’s been allowing them to grow.
So much hurt is forgotten with the horizon
as backdrop. It comes down to simple math.

The beach belongs to none of us, regardless
of color, or money. We all come to sit
at the feet of the surf, watch waves
drag the sand and crush shells for hours.

My brother’s feet are coated in sparkly powder
that leaves a sticky residue when dry.
He’s twenty-three, still unaware of his value.
It is too easy, reader, for me to call him

beautiful, standing against the sky
in cherrywood skin and almond
eyes in the sun, so instead I tell him
he is handsome. I remind him

of a day when I brought him to the beach
as a boy. He’d wandered, trailing a tourist,
a white man pointing toward his hotel—
all for a promised shark tooth.

I yelled for him, pulled him to me,
drove us home. Folly Beach. He was six.
He almost went.

from Poetry, 2021

 

Genetics (Monday Poem)

By Jacqueline Woodson

 

My mother has a gap between
her two front teeth. So does Daddy Gunnar.
Each child in this family has the same space
connecting us.

Our baby brother, Roman, was born pale as dust.
His soft brown curls and eyelashes stop
people on the street.
Whose angel child is this? they want to know.
When I say, My brother, the people
wear doubt
thick as a cape
until we smile
and the cape falls.

 

from Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. 

Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014

Sabbaths 2003 X (Monday Poem)

 by Wendell Berry

But do the Lords of War in fact

hate the world? That would be easy

to bear, if so. If they hated

their children and the flowers

that grow in the warming light. For then

we could hate the haters

and be right. What is hard

is to imagine the Lords of War

may love the things that they destroy.

from This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems by Wendell Berry

Counterpoint, 2013