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 has won several awards such as the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, which was his first, and has won many more after that. Trethewey was named Georgia Woman of the Year following in 2008. Her biracial life began in 1966 when Trethewey was born into a mixed-race family in Gulfport, Mississippi; her white father Eric Terthewey is from Canada and her mother Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough was African American. In Mississippi, people of different races could not legally marry each other; she spends most of her childhood in such racist circumstances, and in the first line of the opening stanza, Trethewey states, "We tell the story every year" (1). It is an important event that occurred in her childhood and which seems impossible for her and her family to forget. This is why she wants to share her experience and the lesson she learned from it. She doesn't want someone from a mixed family to go through the same events as her because of their different race. She tries to teach future generations to fight crime by repeating history over and over for years. Additionally, in one poem she mentions “charred grass green again/charred grass still green” (4-7). This indicates that when members of the Ku Klux Klan came and burned the cross in his yard, which left the withered grass alive again. But people in society have not changed and look at her and her family as before, because of her parents' race and illegal marriage. Not only that, but other African Americans were also mistreated by the Americans. In an interview with Bookslut, Trethewey said, "...on several occasions, African American soldiers were mistreated, and even killed, by their fellow white soldiers..." ("Natasha"). There were a lot of them. In the third stanza, Trethewey cries, “To the cross tied like a Christmas tree” (9). Trethewey tries to give our reader an important visual image of a burning cross that she saw as a small child from a window by comparing it with a Christmas tree to understand its situation in time. Furthermore, she also cries, “some men gathered together, white as angels in their robes” (10). This involves Trethewey's innocent view as a child. The white men in robes refer to members of the Ku Klux Klan, who stood on his lawn and wore their usual white attire. The little girl assumes that these men in white are sent by God, so she connects them to an angel. This stanza shows a faith and hope for a little girl with a new understanding of the world, born into a mixed-race family and living in a racist area, like Mississippi at that time, and suffering from a lifestyle because she was mixed race. This impacts all of his poems coming from Native Guard. As Trethewey says: “I think I've always understood myself to be part, in one way or another, of history. My understanding concerned my very existence” (quoted in