The forsythia outside my window has given up the brilliant citrus yellow and is fading back to the sticky green leaves. I am trying to hold a dull panic at bay. My aim is to steady myself, my nerves. I do not want to doom scroll exhaustively, rants and laments of our country’s frightening descent into chaos.

Look out your window, I tell myself. Write about the forsythia’s brave first burst that ushers in the redbuds’ purple halo. See the lime green of spring grass and tiny leaves.

In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers’ Karamazov, Ivan, the depressed intellectual, confided to his brother that the only reason that keeps him from suicide is the memory of nature’s beauty. He would miss “the sticky green leaves of spring.”

Recently I picked up a poetry collection by Christopher Bursk, left by the poet and inscribed “For Porches, a haven of hope for writers.” I wish I had been here when he came. I must have been visiting my kids out in L.A. He passed away a few years ago. I am reading his poetry for the first time.

While reading Bursk’s poem, I noticed something inside me shifted—the gnawing anxiety, the static buzz grew faint, drowned out, banished, rooted out by the poet’s verse.

 “Ovid at Fifteen” (1^st stanza)

Not another naked woman
…………sprouting roots,
………the kid in front of you moans,
your classmates and you tired
……………..of all those virgins
………begging to be branches,
fountains, marble statues.
……………..What red-blooded American
………boy understands girls
named Byblis, Iphis,
……………Arcas? All those sisters
………spinning till their hands turned
claws, their mouths
……………….beaks? Arachne’s nose
………falling off, then her ears, and all
for art, one more woman shriveling
………………into a spider—
……….maybe not the best story
for fifteen-year-olds
……………..even if you’re prodigies
………..in Latin. Medea, Medusa, Circe.
Jeez, this one’s got snakes growing
………………out of her head.
………..this one’s got dogs
Where her […] should be. Just
……………….what you suspected:
…………women
are not what they seem.

The poem continues for four more pages poking fun at the perspective of teenage boys struggling to comprehend the incomprehensible.  It may seem like an odd poem to transport me but it was the first poem I turned to and it worked. The poem affected me on a physiological level. And it was then that I realized poetry offered salvation—a path to reclaim my equilibrium.

Last night, I was surprised that my sentiment was echoed in the recent New Yorker, under “American Chronicles,” an essay by Jill Lepore, titled, In Case of Emergency. She writes of the faux emergencies used to justify the awfulness of what is happening to this country and then she writes: “I buried my phone under my pillow and closed my eyes. Blindly, I reached over to my nightstand and groped for a book.” One of the Penguin Little Black Classics.  “My heart leapt. I had found my doom-scrolling methadone.”

At first, I did not like that she described reading the classics as “methadone.” But of course, the metaphor is perfect. I am, like so many Americans, addicted to this country’s scary movie. Can’t look away. And in truth, we shouldn’t, but in the meantime, I desperately need an antidote.

Poetry will be my drug of choice like the sticky green leaves of spring.

And on this note, Congratulations to Streetlight’s poetry editors on the recent publications of their new poetry collections. The Legacy of Birds by Sharon Ackerman and Fred Wilbur’s The Heft of Promise.

Trudy Hale is Streetlight Magazine‘s Editor-in-Chief. Born in Memphis, she lived a somewhat chaotic and semi-glamorous life in Hollywood, married to a director and raising their two children. She moved to Virginia and opened Porches Writing Retreat in Nelson County, a retreat that supports and encourages writers of all stripes, regardless of age or checkered past. You can find out more about her on www.porcheswritingretreat.com.