I planned to write this week’s politics newsletter about our strong Afghanistan coverage over the past week.

But last night was filled with howling wind and rain. This morning brought countless images of flooding and destruction from Maryland to Massachusetts, including tornado damage in New Jersey. The early part of the week was filled with dispatches from Louisiana’s lowlands, awash in stormwaters.

I felt so swamped by bad news by the time I got up this morning, I wondered, what’s next? Locusts?

So instead, I bring you balm from poet, teacher and essayist Rachel Hadas, whose story “‘Work with hope’ – a poet and classics scholar on facing the flood of bad news,” was published today. A lyrical observer of daily life whose poetry has been featured in the New Yorker, Hadas has an ability to make texts – from Homer to Emily Dickinson to modern poets and philosophers – come alive for today’s readers. But while recognizing their contemporary significance, she also helps us see how our feelings and thoughts about what seem like our own era’s peculiar – and terrible – problems are as old as the ages. There’s comfort in that:

“We’re in a prolonged period of maddeningly, scarily bad news – and if we follow the 24-hour news cycle, we’re in it up to our chins,” Hadas writes. “But how good has the news ever been? Precisely when or what was the Golden Age? Poet Randall Jarrell wrote, with tongue in cheek, that it’s when people went around complaining how yellow everything looked. Even under dire conditions, most people go on doing what they do for as long as they can.”