What do we do with the rage? The dread for our country? And for some of us, the despair? After this week, it seems hard to feel anything else.

On the world stage, following the takeover of Venezuela and the threats to seize Greenland, we have become a rogue nation—a country to be despised and avoided if at all possible. Donald Trump thinks the world has no choice but to take it, take his predations and tantrums and outlawry. All the world, he reasons, must continue trading with us and cooperating with us in countless ways, for the simple reason that the US is so rich and powerful.

What Trump does not understand, of course, is that he is squandering the legacy America built up over generations, a record of leadership in the world that, while certainly not unblemished, nevertheless made us trusted and respected. That legacy has been a major source of our power and wealth. Now countries are de-risking and de-coupling from us as fast as possible. Trump has guaranteed that he will be the last American president with access to the priceless treasure accumulated by generations of better men who held that office. He is simply throwing away the true power of the American presidency.

At home, we say her name: Renee Good. We say it because it brings us a little closer to her as a fellow human being: a mom; a woman with so much of her life still ahead of her; a person on the same journey of self-discovery we all travel; a daughter, neighbor and friend described by those who knew her best as compassionate and forgiving and kind; our fellow citizen exercising her precious First Amendment rights.

It’s right to learn about Renee Good and remember her and her family in our prayers and hold them in our hearts. It’s the decent thing to do. But somehow, after her awful killing in Minneapolis by ICE officer Jonathan Ross, who shot her in her car in the course of a campaign of immigration enforcement that is storming our streets and neighborhoods in ways no other president has ever ordered—somehow it doesn’t lift the weight of grief, and dread, and despair.

Our country is being forcibly transformed. The killing of Renee Good, the takeover of Venezuela—these are harbingers of our American future. Trump’s authoritarian dream is becoming a reality.

We need to come to terms with that fact. We need to look straight on at it. Set aside outrage and scorn. See the threat, and confront it the only way that can be successful: By democratic—and patriotic—action. I’ve said that I believe this year will be the most consequential year in our country’s history in my life, maybe ever. The issue of our America’s future will be decided in the midterm elections. So there is work to be done.

In such times, poetry may seem a trivial thing. For many, I’m sure, it is. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” Auden said. Still, for me, good poems are nourishment for the work ahead, medicine for the soul. And for our country, too.

As the great Polish-American poet Czesław Miłosz wrote in his poem, “Dedication,” in the dark aftermath of World War II:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWhat is poetry which does not saveNations or people?A connivance with official lies,A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,Readings for sophomore girls.

That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,In this and only this I find salvation.

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Two poems to end with, by two great American poets who, perhaps, Renee Good—herself a poet—might have read and admired.

The first is by Adrienne Rich, a fierce and radical poet I first read in college, decades ago, and who often has left me shaken and changed.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThere's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphilland the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadowsnear a meeting-house abandoned by the persecutedwho disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooledthis isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woodsmeeting the unmarked strip of light—ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell youanything? Because you still listen, because in times like theseto have you listen at all, it's necessaryto talk about trees.

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The second poem is from Louise Glück, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020. In this famous poem, Glück speaks in the persona of a wildflower.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAt the end of my sufferingthere was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call deathI remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.Then nothing. The weak sunflickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to surviveas consciousnessburied in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, beinga soul and unableto speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earthbending a little. And what I took to bebirds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not rememberpassage from the other worldI tell you I could speak again: whateverreturns from oblivion returnsto find a voice:

from the center of my life camea great fountain, deep blueshadows on azure sea water.

—Terry