This past week we were priviliged to work with the distinguished poet Natasha Trethewey. After guiding us through a close reading of several Amistad poems by Elizabeth Alexander (in her collection American Sublime), she helped us create one of our own. Inspired by the original profiles of the captives in John Barber’s book, we then created our own persona poems. You can see them here. But first, here is the poem we wrote together:
Margru
What I remember of home is this:
green – green mangoes, green snakes, green bananas:
brown – my mother, my father, myself, the tree
trunks, the brown earth, the color of my language,
Mende,
the only language I had
to describe these things.
Often I think of
how I came to be here:
my father pawning me, waving goodbye,
his face crumpled, tightened, looking
away from me.
I felt my captor’s white, cold hand
tighten around my wrist as if
he were a solid ghost taking me away.
Now I wish to see again
the green rice fields,
my father’s brown face,
clouds in the sky —
the only white things,
to hear someone speaking my language,
someone saying
Margru.
