Natasha Trethewey is one of the most successful African American poets of the 21st century. Society appreciated his interest and knowledge in literature, especially poetry, Trethewey won numerous awards such as the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, which was his first, and won many others later; Trethewey was named Georgia's Woman of the Next Year in 2008. Her biracial life began in 1966, when Trethewey was born into a mixed-race family in Gulfport, Mississippi; his white father Eric Terthewey is Canadian and his mother Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough was African American. In Mississippi, people of different races could therefore not legally marry each other; he spends much of his childhood in racist circumstances, and in the first line of the opening stanza Trethewey states, “We tell the story every year” (1). This refers to an important event that happened in her childhood that seems impossible for her and her family to forget. For this reason he wants to share his experience and the lessons he has learned from it. She doesn't want someone who comes from a mixed family to have to go through events similar to what she experienced because of their different race. He tries to teach future generations to fight crime by repeating the story over and over for years. Furthermore, in the poem he mentions “the charred grass now green again/the charred grass still green” (4-7). This indicates that when the Ku Klux Klan members came and burned the cross in his yard, leaving the spot of dry grass it was alive again. But people in society have not changed and look at her and her family as they were before, due to her race and her parents' illegal marriage. Not only that, but other African Americans were also abused by Americans. In an interview with Bookslut, Trethewey said "...many times African-American soldiers were mistreated and even killed by their white comrades..." ("Natasha"). There were many of them. In the third stanza Trethewey cries, “To the cross tied like a Christmas tree” (9). Trethewey tries to give us readers an important visual image of a burning cross that she saw as a child from a window by comparing it to the Christmas tree to understand her situation back in time. Furthermore, he also shouts: “some men gathered together, white as angels in their robes” (10). This involves the innocent vision of Trethewey as a child. The white men in suits refer to those members of the Ku Klux Klan, who were standing on his lawn wearing their customary white garb. The little girl assumes that those men dressed in white are sent by God, so she connects them to an angel. This verse shows a faith and hope for a little girl with a new understanding of the world who was born into a mixed-race family and lived in a racist area, like Mississippi at that time, and suffered from a lifestyle because she was mixed. This impacts all of his poems that come from Native Guard. As Trethewey says, “I think I've always thought of myself as a part of history. My understanding had to do with my very existence” (qtd. in