Scenario: After seeing the images of the damage and the suffering the people of the Gulf Coast were going through (days 2 and 3), after spending a good deal of time talking with my children about what they were seeing in the news, I decided to seek some comfort in a book, one of several I purchased a few days earlier, with a B&N gift card a dear friend gifted me. Honestly, I wanted to escape the pain I was seeing on TV, pain that was clearly seeping into me. Yes, we helped, donated money and clothes and food, but somehow -at least in my head- it didn't seem enough. It still doesn't.

The book begins with several short poems, and each of them is numbered. I didn't get too far reading, as you'll notice below.

V

Glee! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Fourty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.

Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls, --
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom
Spining upon the shoals!

How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, "But the forty?
Did they come back no more?"

Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller's eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.

VI

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain'
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

* from The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson