YOUNG: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Jeff Young. Later this month, we’ll mark the 40th Earth Day—and April, as you may know, is also National Poetry Month. The natural world has been a favorite theme for poets over the centuries—and it still is.

TRETHEWAY: I’m Natasha Tretheway, and I began writing poems on long trips as a child. My father driving in the front seat and my stepmother beside him trying to entertain me when I got bored would say to me, ‘Why don’t you write poems about what you see outside of your window?’

And those are some of the earliest poems I began to write, and I suppose that driving through Louisiana and Mississippi what I was seeing outside of my window was the natural world speeding by. All those pine trees and the piney woods, also the swampy marshlands around New Orleans.

I think that the job of poets and poetry is to record the cultural memory of a people. And certainly our relationship to an engagement with the natural is part of that.

This is “Monument”:

Today the ants are busy
beside my front steps, weaving
in and out of the hill they’re building.
I watch them emerge and—

like everything I’ve forgotten—disappear
into the subterranean, a world
made by displacement. In the cemetery
last June, I circled, lost—

weeds and grass grown up all around—
the landscape blurred and waving.
At my mother’s grave, ants streamed in
and out like arteries, a tiny hill rising

above her untended plot. Bit by bit,
red dirt piled up, spread
like a rash on the grass; I watched a long time
the ants’ determined work,

how they brought up soil
of which she will be part,
and piled it before me. Believe me when I say
I’ve tried not to begrudge them

their industry, this reminder of what
I haven’t done. Even now,
the mound is a blister on my heart,
a red and humming swarm.

I began writing this poem because I saw the ants building that ant mound outside of my apartment many years ago and it reminded me of a visit to my mother’s grave in which I’d also seen ants building a mound. One of the things that excited me about making the connection between those two things was the poems’ title.

Looking up the mound in my dictionary I learned that a mound is also a monument, and so there those ants were building the monument that I had not erected on my mother’s grave. They were tending to a kind of remembrance that I had neglected to do.