Contemporary International Writers

This poem stuck with me the most after reading and re-reading Szymborsa’s poems, because it felt the most relevant to today’s current events. This particular poem was all about how whenever there is a war, or a tragedy, there are always people who have to stay behind and clean up the messes made. With everything going on in the news today between the Kavanaugh trial, Trump’s never ending string of offenses, and the multiple wars ravaging countries and families, I feel as though there are far too many messes to clean. There was a line that went, “Someone’s got to trudge through the sludge and the ashes, through the sofa springs, the shards of glass, the bloody rags.” This particular quote stood out, and impacted me so deeply because I think that this showed the most emotion, and the death of the situation the most clearly. The work that goes into cleaning up these messes is exhausting, it is unpleasant in every possible way. The people that have to endure this at first are the ones who were there from the start, who knew what life was like before said tragedy. They had the hardest time dealing with this and therefore a new wave of people end up coming in who won’t be as deeply emotionally traumatized as the first wave. In my head, what I related this back to is the Kavanaugh trial and the sexual assault crisis in our country today. Every time a new man in the spotlight is accused of assault, all of the women who have suffered in their lifetime are forced to re-live their trauma and re-pick up their pieces. Women in this country are constantly cleaning up the messes that men made, that they never asked or even volunteered to clean up. We are holding the hands of other women, trying to help lift them out of the ashes, while also trying to hold ourselves together. This is what I personally related this poem back to and it really struck a chord with me, I absolutely loved it and thought that it was extremely relevant to one of the many crises happening in our country today.