Meditation at Decatur Square

By Natasha Trethewey
1

In which I try to decipher
                          the story it tells,
this syntax of monuments
                          flanking the old courthouse:
                                       here, a rough outline
like the torso of a woman
                          great with child—
                                       a steatite boulder from which
                          the Indians girdled the core
                                                     to make of it a bowl,
                                       and left in the stone a wound; here,

the bronze figure of Thomas Jefferson,
                                       quill in hand, inscribing
                          a language of freedom,
                                                    a creation story—
                                       his hand poised at the word
                           happiness. There is not yet an ending,
                                       no period—the single mark,
intended or misprinted, that changes
                          the meaning of everything.

Here too, for the Confederacy,
                          an obelisk, oblivious
               in its name—a word
                          that also meant the symbol
to denote, in ancient manuscripts,
               the spurious, corrupt, or doubtful;
                                             at its base, forged
                          in concrete, a narrative
               of valor, virtue, states' rights. 

Here, it is only the history of a word,
                          obelisk,
               that points us toward
                          what's not there; all of it
palimpsest, each mute object 
               repeating a single refrain: 

               Remember this.


2

Listen, there is another story I want
              this place to tell: I was a child here,

traveling to school through the heart of town
              by train, emerging into the light

of the square, in the shadow of the courthouse,
              a poetics of grief already being written.

This is the place to which I vowed
              I'd never return, hallowed ground now,

the new courthouse enshrining
              the story of my mother's death—

her autopsy, the police reports, even
              the smallest details: how first

her ex-husband's bullet entered
              her raised left hand, shattering the finger

on which she'd worn her rings; how tidy
              her apartment that morning, nothing

out of place but for, on the kitchen counter,
              a folding knife, a fifty-cent roll of coins.



3

Once, a poet wrote: Books live in the mind once,
like honey inside a beehive. When I read
those words to my brother, after his release,
this is what he said: Inside the hive of prison
my mind lived in books. Inside, everything
was a story unfinished: the letters he wrote
for inmates who could not write, who waited
each day for an answer to arrive; the library
with too few books, the last pages ripped out
so someone could roll a cigarette. To get by,
he read those books, conjuring new endings
where the stories stopped. Inside, everything
was possibility, each graving a pathway, one
word closer to the day he'd walk out of prison
into the rest of his story—a happy one or not,
depending on where you marked the ending.




4

I have counter the years I am
a counter of years ten twenty

thirty now So much gone and yet
she lives in my mind like a book

to which I keep returning even
as the story remains the same

her ending  the space she left
a wound a womb  a bowl hewn

Copyright Credit: Natasha Trethewey, "Meditation at Decatur Square" from Monument: Poems New and Selected.  Copyright © 2018 by Natasha Trethewey.  Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Source: Monument: Poems New and Selected (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)