Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 8, Number 2. November 2025. ISSN: 2581-7094
The Milk of Human Kindness
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Mary Saracino
Empathy resides in a tender heart
willing to cradle grief as well as joy,
gentle hands that embrace a world
broken by greed and the lust for power.
Can humankind survive without
the milk of human kindness,
the ancient urge to find common ground?
How do we nurture the soul’s
need for justice and compassion
when hatred reigns free
ridiculing otherness, differences,
diversity in all its many forms?
How do we mend the scars
tattooed on our skin
from countless years of heartless indifference?
Can we unite to end this war being waged
on all that is good?
Can peace prevail for women and men
of every hue and nation?
In these troubling times,
we must reclaim our birthright,
resurrect our innate urge to celebrate our
connection
to all beings, human and non-human—everywhere.
We must become weavers of transformation
recasting old patterns of division
into a cloak of loving kindness,
clothing the world in compassion,
working together, hand-in-hand,
heart-to-heart, to mend the social fabric,
heal the wounds—before it’s too late.
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Bio:
Mary Saracino
is a novelist, memoir writer, and poet. Her most recent novel, Heretics: A Love
Story (2014) was published by Pearlsong Press. Her novel, The Singing of Swans
(Pearlsong Press 2006) was a 2007 Lambda Literary Awards finalist in the
Spirituality category. Her first novel, No Matter What (Spinsters Ink 1993) was
a Minnesota Book Award finalist, Fiction category. Her second novel, Finding
Grace (Spinsters Ink 1999) won the 1999 Colorado Authors’ League, “Top Hand
Award”, Adult Fiction Mainstream/Literary. She co-edited (with Mary Beth Moser)
She Is Everywhere! Volume 3: An anthology of writings in womanist/feminist
spirituality (iUniverse 2012), which earned the 2013 Enheduanna Award for
Excellence in Women-Centered Literature from Sofia University. Her fiction,
creative non-fiction, and poetry has appeared in a variety of literary and
cultural journals online and in-print. For more information about Mary, visitwww.marysaracino.com <http://www.marysaracino,com> and https://pearlsong.com/authors/mary-saracino/
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