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.

Natasha Trethewey, "Duty" from Monument: Poems New and Selected.