Duty
When he tells the story now
he's at the center of it,
everyone else in the house
falling into the backdrop—
my mother, grandmother,
an uncle, all dead now—props
in our story: father and daughter
caught in memory's half-light.
I'm too young to recall it,
so his story becomes the story:
1969, Hurricane Camille
bearing down, the old house
shuddering as if it will collapse.
Rain pours into every room
and he has to keep moving,
keep me out of harm's way—
a father's first duty: to protect.
And so, in the story, he does:
I am small in his arms, perhaps
even sleeping. Water is rising
around us and there is no
higher place he can take me
than this, memory forged
in the storm's eye: a girl
clinging to her father. What
can I do but this? Let him
tell it again and again as if
it's always been only us,
and that, when it mattered,
he was the one who saved me.
Copyright Credit: Natasha Trethewey, "Duty" from Monument: Poems New and Selected. Copyright © 2018 by Natasha Trethewey. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.