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Month: July 2023

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Great Grey Owl

Posted on July 30, 2023 by stephen t berg / 11 Comments

  From the wide heart of the Great Plains, home of bluestem, fescue, and bromegrass, where in high summer, a wavy thin haze of heat hangs over fields of clover,...

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Teenage Shrub

Posted on July 19, 2023 by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

  They shall be like trees planted by the rivers of water,that bring forth fruit in season,their leaf also shall not wither,and whatsoever they do shall prosper...

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To the man who entered the gender studies class and stabbed a teacher and two students

Posted on July 12, 2023 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

  Revulsion is a word hardly strong enough to convey how I felt about what you did. Not only did you bend toward eliminating lives of those you must view as abh...

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The Perfect Poem

Posted on July 5, 2023 by stephen t berg / 14 Comments

  Christ wrote in the sand, where he stooped, beside the “adulteress”, who trembled, facing her imminent demise by stones, as prescribed by the executives of re...

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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