Natasha Trethewey

Appointed poet Iaureate in 2012, Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966 and earned an MA in literature at Hollins University in Virginia and an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts. She is currently a professor of English and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet.

Again, the Fields

After Winslow Homer

“Again, the Fields” is from Native Guard (2006), the book for which Trethewey was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.

the dead they lay long the lines like sheaves of Wheat I could have walked on the boddes all most from one end too the other

No more muskets, the bone-drag

weariness of marching, the trampled

grass, soaked earth red as the wine

of sacrament. Now, the veteran

5

turns toward a new field, bright

as domes of the republic. Here,

he has shrugged off the past—his jacket

and canteen flung down in the corner.

At the center of the painting, he anchors

10

the trinity, joining earth and sky.

The wheat falls beneath his scythe—

a language of bounty—the swaths

like scripture on the field’s open page.

Boundless, the wheat stretches beyond

15

the frame, as if toward a distant field—

the white canvas where sky and cotton

meet, where another veteran toils,

his hands the color of dark soil.

(2006)