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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)
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When she went back to New Orleans two months after the hurricane, she was dumbfounded.
"You see all your stuff out in the street," she said. "Like this big dump. I looked for this baby doll I used to love. I tried to remember the house the last day I saw it, the day of my birthday party. A lot of imagery from that visit went into my New Orleans poem."
"When I write," the poet says, "I'm in another zone."
All of her poems, her oeuvre, every bit of her writing from childhood on, was lost in the hurricane. If she sat and thought about it for a long time, Robinson says, she'd cry. So she doesn't.
The crows are grey now, and caw in a listless perch
On great oaks that gasp to retell Noah's tale.
The grass once green and fat with greed in the humid air
Now brittle, and petrified by the moment's sudden enrapture.
The poet is standing on her small porch. Mosquitoes are everywhere, surfing on the Louisiana heat. "I'm working on my manuscript now," she says, her eyes full of light. "It's poetry. The hurricane will be in there. It's based on my life."
