I am by nature an optimistic man, a glass-half-full kind of guy. They say nothing is ever as grim as you fear, or as great as you hope, and that sounds about right. Within that spectrum, it just seems to me that, somehow, down through the generations, against all odds, people have been finding ways to make life better.

From the elimination of 99 percent of childhood mortality, to the collapse of extreme poverty in most places on earth, to the dramatic reduction of personal violence in most societies, to the vast expansion of personal liberty and autonomy—we’ve been moving mostly in the right direction for centuries.

That sounds pollyannish, I know. Or privileged—and I get that, too.

Still, I’ve lived some hard times myself, and seen a good deal of human wickedness and misery.

I lost my father when I was young—never knew him as a man, in both senses of that phrase: I wasn’t a man when he died, so have lived my adulthood without him; and he was never a man to me on his own terms. He didn’t live long enough for that kind of relationship to grow between us; he was simply my father. There’s a hole in my heart still.

I’ve lost a marriage, with all the brokenness that entails.

My career—which I’ve loved and felt lucky to have—has shown me the dark side of history as it unfolds in blood and brutality. Plenty of places, plenty of darkness. My older daughter once asked me if it made me sad to see such things. I told her, “The day it doesn’t make me sad is the day I should quit.” As a journalist in those places and moments, it always seemed to me that you have to grasp the pain around you in your own heart to understand it, to describe it accurately. And maybe some of it rubs off.

Nevertheless, I’m an optimist. But these times are teaching me a necessary lesson.

Optimism cannot be a bromide, a soothing habit of mind that merely placates anxieties that have their own rightful place in our lives. And in our time, in our country—we are right to worry for the future.

America will never be the same.

We have to face the fact that after Trump and Trumpism, we will not be able to rebuild much of what is being systematically wrecked.

Our status in the world, both economic and moral, is shot for good. And so our great cultural power and influence will dwindle, too. Already is.

Many natural treasures throughout our nation are now being harmed and degraded by leaders and policymakers who hold the very notion of caring for our environment in contempt—and those treasures, bequeathed to us (I believe) by God and by our forebears, will be irretrievably damaged.

And most of all, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves as Americans can never be the same. So much has been lost—forever. That’s the whole point of the second Trump term.

I have been thinking much about this loss. What can optimists do in the face of it?

We can build. Not rebuild, but build anew. And I have come to understand that part of the foundation we must build for the next America will be the experience of these terrible losses. We must respect them. We must grasp the pain in our own hearts. Make it mortar for the bricks of the future we build for our beloved country.

So two poems about loss this week, one about civic loss, the other about loss of the natural world.

Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” was published in The New Yorker magazine in the days after 9/11.

W. S. Merwin, a great American poet of both nature and spirit, spent half a century restoring a forest on the island of Maui in Hawaii.

—Terry

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedTry to praise the mutilated world.Remember June's long days,and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.The nettles that methodically overgrowthe abandoned homesteads of exiles.You must praise the mutilated world.You watched the stylish yachts and ships;one of them had a long trip ahead of it,while salty oblivion awaited others.You've seen the refugees going nowhere,you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.You should praise the mutilated world.Remember the moments when we were togetherin a white room and the curtain fluttered.Return in thought to the concert where music flared.You gathered acorns in the park in autumnand leaves eddied over the earth's scars.Praise the mutilated worldand the gray feather a thrush lost,and the gentle light that strays and vanishesand returns.

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThis is what I have heard

at last the wind in Decemberlashing the old trees with rainunseen rain racing along the tilesunder the moonwind rising and fallingwind with many cloudstrees in the night wind

after an age of leaves and featherssomeone deadthought of this mountain as moneyand cut the treesthat were here in the windin the rain at nightit is hard to say itbut they cut the sacred ‘ohias thenthe sacred koas thenthe sandalwood and the halasholding aloft their green firesand somebody dead turned cattle looseamong the stumps until killing time

but the trees have risen one more timeand the night wind makes them soundlike the sea that is yet unknownthe black clouds race over the moonthe rain is falling on the last place