Domestic Work, 1937

All week she's cleaned
someone else's house,
stared down her own face
in the shine of copper--
bottomed pots, polished
wood, toilets she'd pull
the lid to--that look saying

Let's make a change, girl.

But Sunday mornings are hers--
church clothes starched
and hanging, a record spinning
on the console, the whole house
dancing. She raises the shades,
washes the rooms in light,
buckets of water, Octagon soap.

Cleanliness is next to godliness ...

Windows and doors flung wide,
curtains two-stepping
forward and back, neck bones
bumping in the pot, a choir
of clothes clapping on the line.

Nearer my God to Thee ...

She beats time on the rugs,
blows dust from the broom
like dandelion spores, each one
a wish for something better

Commentary:Natasha Trethewey (born April 26, 1966) is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi. Ms.Trethewey work combines free verse with slightly more structured and traditional forms similar to the sonnet and the villanelle. Her work studies "memory and the racial legacy of America". ‘Domestic Work, 1937’ is from her poem collection Domestic Work. The poem “Domestic Work, 1937” talks about a domestic worker, a maid, servant or housekeeper, who is appreciating her Sunday mornings, where she does not have to work. Imagery is used in line 9 ­ 15 to describe Sunday mornings to the readers. Sunday mornings are typically easy going and very calm. I like how the poem shows her life as organized and monotonous, with just a bit of a spark of light and color on Sundays Imagery and personification helps describe the little things in the poem. The imagery creates an impression of relaxing and clean compared to the first stanza where the speaker has to work hard.
The personification gives the readers a sense of how lively the house wason a Sunday morning The tone given in the poem is relaxed and also positive. This reflects on how the speaker feels on a Sunday morning with no work to do and only her house to clean. The one line stanzas give the readers a look inside the speaker’s mind and allows the readers to empathize with the speaker more. Line 16 is an idiom,which the speaker uses to reassure herself that what she is doing is important to other people.