A Poem About Compassion

As a young girl, my grandmother indulged my love of poetry with a gift: The Golden Treasury of Poetry, a 1959 collection edited by Louis Untermeyer. One poem from that book stayed with me for years—William Blake's The Fly, which compares our fragile human existence to that of a small, easily-crushed insect.
I didn't write anything about it at the time. But poems like that don't leave you; they just wait for the right moment to resurface. Years later, mine did, in a poem called Saved a Spider Today.
It started as something almost silly: a spider, lost in my shower, doing "a clumsy ballet." I rescued him, set him down outside safely away from a hungry Blue Jay, and went on with my morning. But somewhere in that small act, Blake's poem came back to me—the fragility, the fear, the simple mercy of being helped along by someone bigger than your circumstances.
That's really what the poem is about. We're all just trying to exist in the best way we know how. Sometimes we lose our way—get "lost along the way," as I wrote—and the real gift is when someone lifts us up and helps us keep going.
I ended the poem with a wish I still carry for everyone I meet: I hope someone saves you someday, when you lose your way—gently, so you don't become a victim of prey.
Compassion doesn't have to be dramatic. Sometimes it's just a cup, a spider, and a moment of noticing that another creature needed help finding their way home.