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Author: stephen t berg

Culture/Racism

The Day After Watching James Baldwin’s ‘I Am Not Your Negro’

Posted on June 2, 2020 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

I wrote this poem last September. A week ago, when George Floyd was murdered, I recalled the poem and the documentary.   The Day After Watching James Baldwin’s ...

Potential/Presence/Soul

Significant Strides in Soul Spotting

Posted on May 24, 2020 by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

We have it on forensic authority that the ache in your heartcan be filled with sunlight; the gnawing doubt about acceptance can be traced to the doorstep of you...

Art/Beauty/Light

Colours that Break Your Heart

Posted on May 19, 2020 by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

Colours that Break Your Heart Lots of them in nature.Take the willow leaf, for instance, tentative to emanate in still-chilly-April, but there it is, that first...

Love/Mother's Day

1938 Barley Harvest and Our Mother 1922 – 2013

Posted on May 10, 2020 by stephen t berg / 16 Comments

Under the belch of a 10-20 Titan tractor,smell of hot bearings, grease and barley dust, by the steel wheel, bowing belt and fly wheel, the feeder, cutter, cylin...

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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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