Chaya Brenner week 7 - Pick a Poet #2

 This week I chose the poem “Housekeeping” by Natasha Trethewey. I know we have to do these blogs, but god’s teeth her poetry is just so pretty I actually look forward to writing about it. So the poem starts off somber she talks about how broken and in disrepair the items in her household are. When she moves into discussing fixing them and cleaning up, however, the tone completely changes. It goes from sadly looking at the broken household goods, to the magic of fixing them up. My favorite line in the entire poem is probably, “Beating rugs against the house, we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading across the yard.” It just sounds so magical! In my head, I can picture a girl outside hitting a rug against a house, a spray of stars flying out, and wrapping around her like her own personal galaxy. Trethewey actually uses the word “magic” a few lines prior to describing the act of fixing up the household. So I think the idea of using stars in this later line reinforces the idea that there’s something fantastical going on while they clean.

I did notice that the lines alternate for the rest of the poem between talking about the magic of cleaning and the reasons they are cleaning. The line right after the beautiful stars contrasts by talking about the bugs in the house. It almost feels like a reflection of what it really looked like vs. how she saw it when she was younger. In her childhood, housekeeping was magical and exciting, but now looking back she can picture how they had to chase out gross bugs. A few lines prior she also mentions how they had to collect all the little bits of soap leftover to keep using and keep every last bit of food to keep cooking with. This is surrounded by a line about the magic of fixing up all the holes and broken things and the beautiful star simile about stars. 

When she describes her mother, singing while she irons, she uses the word “reverie”. “My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.”, this is probably one of my all-time favorite words. Reverie has this connotation of daydreaming and being lost in pleasant thoughts. It makes me smile to think amidst the cleaning and chores her mother is able to daydream. Even though they didn’t have much in terms of superficial things, they had happiness and they had magic. I just think it’s truly beautiful. 

(Disclaimer I wrote this as if it was the author’s experience but I actually believe it’s actually based on her grandmother’s life, I’m not entirely sure.)