In a Young Writer's Verse, a Ruined City's Sorrow

A childhood doll was one of the only things salvaged from Trenise Robinson's family home in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. (Photos By Michael Williamson -- The Washington Post)

BATON ROUGE, La. -- She found her muse in the muck and horror of it all. In the way her New Orleans went dead silent. Horns dropped from sight. Spindly-legged men who used to be on street corners staring as if from an old tintype suddenly -- whoosh -- gone.

She's a young poet, and so she started writing.

What happened to the Creole and Cajun aromas

From mawmaw's kitchen, that loved to shake their hips

And wave their handkerchiefs in the wind?

The verses are from her published poem "La Nouvelle-Orleans Apres l'Orage" -- "New Orleans After the Storm."

Aug. 27 of last year happened to be Trenise Robinson's 21st birthday. The Robinsons lived in New Orleans East, on North Idlewood. They sliced cake and paid little mind to the angry wind and waters churning off the gulf. But a day later they all had to bolt. Trenise's mother, Sandra, a school administrator, came to Baton Rouge. Trenise returned to the University of Richmond for her senior year.

"When Trenise was in preschool," Sandra Robinson says, "her teacher told us, 'Mrs. Robinson, this child can write.' "

It was the kind of benevolent praise bestowed upon many children. But the child did start to break away. "She was published in children's anthologies," says Sandra Robinson.

In college, she was poetry editor of the Messenger, the school's literary magazine.

Mother and daughter are at the kitchen table of their small townhouse here on the outskirts of Baton Rouge. The kitchen table is the only piece of furniture they were able to salvage from their New Orleans home. They got down on hands and knees for days and scrubbed the sand and soot from it.

At her mother's praise, Robinson just shrugs. She doesn't know where the gift came from. "It's very saturated with imagery," she says of her poetry.