Read the excerpt from "Pilgrimage.”Here, the Mississippi carved its mud-dark path, a graveyardFor skeletons of sunken riverboat. Here, the river changed its course, Turning away from the city as one turns, forgetting, from the past—The abandoned bluffs, land sloping up above the river’s bend—where nowThe Yazoo fills the Mississippi’s empty bed.Pilgrimage, "Elegy for the Native Guards", "South" from Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey. Copyright (c) 2006 by Natasha Trethewey. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.