Lesser Burden

In your crowded heart there’s a list:
     cares, fears, hopes, loves,
     dissipations, disappointments,
     obsessions, resentments, regrets, resolves.
In your crowded heart there’s a potted plant
     you take little notice of until it’s brown past reviving;
     there’s a pear past eating, past its honeyed amber,
     entering its blackening. 
In your crowded heart there are things to fix
     which you can’t quite find the time for,
     or can’t quite find, or can’t quite remember;
     things scattered as though strewn through roadside trees:
         broken hair brushes, candy wrappers, crushed beer cans,
         flyers the wind has wrapped around trunks,
     and you, with your blue refuse bag and trash tongs,
     believing in time you’ll clean it all up.

Then one day in the dark of a late northern afternoon,
going home with groceries, pausing in the rain under a neon sign,
the glistening sidewalk stretching toward a hidden horizon,
     something hobbled in you breaks free,
     something lifts without reason or cause,
     something comes, brief but deep as an embrace,
     something as unearned as your birth,
     and you walk on toward that horizon,
     shouldering a lesser burden.


26 Comments

  1. Thank you for “book ending” my inspiring week – the privilege of hearing hope from Gabor Mate, the doctor and a very human, sweet ripening poem by Stephen Berg, the poet. Anne

  2. As I sat with my mother in hospice recently, I was very aware of that list of “cares, fears, hopes, loves, dissipations, disappointments, obsessions, resentments, regrets, resolves”. There were so many conversations that hadn’t happened. As I realized that now they never would, somehow, what seemed to matter most was the love I felt, the sadness of knowing the end was near, but also the tenderness that goes with helping someone who is no longer able to do things themselves, and the comfort in realizing that my mother had done her best. I hope as time goes on, I can keep some of that clutter out of my “crowded heart” and instead, remember what mattered most in those moments.
    As always, thank you Stephen for sharing beautiful thoughts and making me cry and smile at the same time.

  3. Ahh. Exhale. Puts me in mind of these lines of Robert Browning’s I read this week:

    “…My soul/smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll/freshening and fluttering in the wind”. From “The Last Ride Together”.

  4. ‘and you, with your blue refuse bag and trash tongs,
    believing in time you’ll clean it all up.’

    As always, lovely and poignant, Stephen.

    I feel like that something hobbled in me is on the verge of breaking free. Perhaps turning 60 has that effect on a person…

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *