Monument Quotes

“After Your Death

First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
from your touch, left empty the jars

you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,

I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or—like another I plucked
and split open—being taken from the inside:

a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“This is how the past interrupts our lives, all of it entering the same doorway--like the hole in the trunk of my neighbor's tree: at once a natural shelter, haven for small creatures, but also evidence of injury, an entrance for decay.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“Waking, I am freighted
with memory: my mother's last words

spoken--after her death--in a dream:
Do you know what it means

to have a wound that never heals?”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul:
that one does not bury the mother's body
in the ground but in the chest, or--like you--

you carry her corpse on your back.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“What does it mean to be safe in the world?”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“How can I see anything

but this: how trauma lives in the sea
of my body, awash in the waters

of forgetting.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“How not to think of loss,

how it takes hold and grows: like lacuna
snails, slow and deliberate, on a reed?

Why is everything I see the past
I've tried to forget?”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“When I think of this now,
I see how the past holds us captive,
its beautiful ruin etched on the mind's eye”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“I'd follow my father from book
to book, gathering citations, listen
as he named--like a field guide to Virginia--

each flower and tree and bird as if to prove
a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater
than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs
at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:
his forehead white with illumination--

a lit bulb--the rest of his face in shadow,
darkened as if the artist meant to contrast
his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“the little fires set
the flames of an idea licking the page
how knowledge burns”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“Always there is something more to know”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“Now
the house is a museum of everything

she can't let go”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“Before the war, they were happy, he said,
quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year

history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,
and better off under a master's care.

I watched the words blur on the page. No one
raised a hand, disagreed. Not even me.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“I begin to see
our lives are like this--we take
what we need of light.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected