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Sufficient unto the day is the wonder thereof

Posted on November 4, 2024 by stephen t berg / 32 Comments

— Barely 18 when I left a winter job working for Saskatchewan Parks, clearing scrubland for new campgrounds at Good Spirit Lake,earning $1.65 per hour and a pou...

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Standing Up

Posted on November 1, 2024 by stephen t berg / 12 Comments

  To write a poem standing up, I hadn’t thought of it, but these days one must be vigilant, as everywhere, there are drones with rows of eyes and ears like vamp...

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Middle East Elegy

Posted on October 22, 2024 by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

  I am gone like a shadow at evening;I am shaken off like a locust.  -Psalm 109 A father sobs. His shoulders shake.It’s still early in the night. More thermite,...

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Names long-listed for YHWH, the “I AM”

Posted on October 8, 2024 by stephen t berg / 18 Comments

Denim woman reads a gardenWounds heal in fragrance of forest Skein of sea under silver wash of skySleeping soil beneath eucalyptus leavesRush of winged elm seed...

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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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