Pick a Poet - Myth by Natasha Tretheway - Zoey Eisenband

        Yet again, a Natasha Tretheway poem has given me chills. I usually have a hard time understanding poems. Most of the time, it just sounds like the author is using a random word generator to come up with sentences and English teachers just try to make meaning out of these random words when really there’s no meaning at all!! Tretheway is one of the few poets that actually make sense to me. This poem is about coping with the sad reality of the death of a loved one. Sometimes it is hard to accept the fact that they are gone. The only place that they still live is in our dreams, but when we wake up, they're gone again. I love how Tretheway juxtaposes the connection between the fact that she was sleeping when this person died and the fact that she now sees the person alive in her dreams. 

I was really confused by the end of this poem. There is a * at the end of the poem, and after that, the poem repeats backward. I guess this is to prove that the poem works both backward and forwards. I feel like it has to be a symbol of some kind, but I can't think of what it could be. It is almost like the poem rewinds back to the beginning. Maybe this is symbolic of Natasha’s feelings toward a loved one dying. Maybe she wishes she could rewind back to when they were still alive. I’m not sure if this is the correct interpretation, but Mrs. Ho always says that it is right as long as you can explain your answer.