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Month: April 2011

Poetics

Welding is conviction

Posted on April 19, 2011 by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Arnold Christofferson—who likes his last name, but wishes it started with a K, like Kris’s— is standing outside of his machine shop. His steel-toe Kodiaks...

Nature

Reviresco Thanks You!

Posted on April 15, 2011 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

One more thank you, to poets, musicians, creators and organizers. Thank you to Wee Book Inn on Whyte. Most of all, thank you to everyone who came out. For what ...

Christianity/Spirituality

See you in the morning

Posted on April 13, 2011 by stephen t berg / 12 Comments

I find myself listening to a 40 year old recording of my aunt Irma singing ‘The Holy City’ and remember the riots of mimicry and mocking, the operat...

Poetics

REVIRESCO

Posted on April 7, 2011 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

a reviresco haiku ear on cracked rock hear the green beneath ring in the spring -stb Only days away. Hopefully you’ll be there in all your verdure. Bouquets to ...

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Over the coming months, I’ll be slowly retiring Grow Mercy. This Easter marks 20 years and some 1500 posts. (And here, a deep bow to you, for reading and/or responding.) I’ll not, however, be retiring the impulse behind Grow Mercy, but will be shifting, exploring, following a hybridized urge, and a genre to suit. For me, what these decades have increasingly revealed is how writing is a spiritual path. Now, for whatever time and energy remains for me, I’ll be tilting more toward The Ragged Psalmist, still inchoate, but the handle feels like it fits. I do hope you’ll subscribe.

Why — The Ragged Psalmist?

Because some stubborn ember, still warm, compels me to write some cobbled songs — praise and lament, cries and sighs — and sound them back to the sacred Mystery.

To throw a wrench into a world geared up for business; to resist the moneychangers in their corporate temples — because poetry is political, and light is its administrative wing.

Because old lies and old words screw us over and must be remade to tell the truth; because our glossary of mockery needs burial, and the lexicon that’s left needs anointing.

To strive to honour the life of a sparrow; attend the spell of a dead star — whose light we still see; to feel, down to the bone, the quantum foam, we all flail in.

To thicken compassion and thin out aggression; to oppose injustice and hate in a way that excludes no one, not even the hater.

To let failure, discouragement, suffering and perishing have their say, without any spoon of bromide; to let joy, delight, and beauty come as they may.

To penetrate darkness and delusion — and so discover all this love in us.

Because mindfulness and mercy need constant oxygen.

Because in the time that’s left I want to tattoo the implications of our “forgiving victim” on the body suit of my heart.

Because reality points to unity — and we must hurry to catch up.

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