Once again I reach for poetry, for calm in the midst of chaos

That crash you heard yesterday was the sound of angry people trying to smash Democracy to pieces, and that persistent chatter you hear today is the sound of people trying to pick up the pieces.

Did anyone sleep last night? Can anyone think straight today? Is anyone anywhere getting any work done? I feel at once a sense of urgency, a need to read more and hear more and do more, accompanied by a sense of helplessness and confusion. I watch from a distance when what I'd really like to do is roll up my sleeves and start sweeping up the broken shards.

Which is why I was drawn this morning to Natasha Trethewey's poem "Housekeeping," in which a young girl and her mother "mourn the broken things" and get to work with glue and nails to save what they can from a catastrophe undefined but imaginable. Trethewey has written often of the violence and abuse that characterized her childhood home, the racial prejudice that constrained her family's life, and the way Hurricane Katrina ravaged her community, but she also writes frequently of the unheralded people who quietly pick up the pieces and try to restore order after chaos. Another Trethewey poem, "Watcher," describers her brother's post-Katrina job watching for detritus washing up on a beach where waves can't wash away the deep pain of community trauma.

"Housekeeping" begins with brokenness and ends with expectation of better things to come, eliding the fact that the mother so lovingly evoked in the poem would eventually be murdered by her abuser. The poem situates readers in a peaceful moment between whatever act brought brokenness into the home and the violence that would later remove the mother from the scene, suggesting that the gentle act of housekeeping--of picking up the broken pieces--exists as a temporary respite from the surrounding chaos.

And yet what peace that moment brings, the mother singing as she irons, the daughter paging through a book of wishes for better days. Housekeeping is what we do when things get broken, even if the fix we can hope for is at best tenuous and temporary. But still we get to work with glue and nails and elbow grease, even as "All day we watch / for the mail, some news from a distant place."