Every morning I turn on my computer and receive a lovely photo and poem by award- winning poet John Caddy. I've know John for many years. When I first began working at Milkweed Editions (a superb literary press in Minneapolis) there was a lot of excitement when his book The Color of Mesabi Bones won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. I have his permission to share this recent post with you. It brought a sense of freshness to a cold March morning on Lake Superior.



We are tender toward the young.
Gentle in our eyes are lives just opening:
Smalls, the risen seed, the nestling’s gape,
grasshopper nymph in perfect miniature,
a tulip bud just coloring,
the spotted fawn in ferns,
all the small who are potentials,
all the lives of innocence:
but how helps this our survival?
Why feel so far beyond our kind?
Perhaps to make us tender
for a moment toward our selves.


It is not fashionable to explore our interconnectedness with the Others. It is almost reflexive to accuse such attempts as excessive sentiment, but this is really just a last gasp of the gendering of science.

Explore your own responses to other lives; wonder how such feelings came to be. -- John Caddy