~

Psalm of a Young Soldier

Posted on by stephen t berg / 15 Comments

Lord, the days have grown dark with smoke
and the nights are lit with missiles
and I will not see another moon.

Have mercy.
My bones are wax.
My soul is ash.
O God, how long?

Will violence forever be progenitor
of this world’s values?

Will the malignancy of bloated egos
forever lead us beside death’s waters?

Will the ministers of illusion and conspiracy,
with slogans from our shrunken vocabulary,

forever divide us, then provide us
as convenient targets — scapegoats, sacrificial victims?

Open your eyes, Lord, the land is sprouting roadside crosses.
Who will be left? Who will think to praise you?

I am sick with grief.
I swim in tears.
I am undone, but for these hollow heaves.

Here I am, 21, and consumed by sorrow.
I stagger in the dark, up your holy mountain,
as under a sack of rocks.

I do not reach you.
There is no holy mountain, no holy mountaintop.

Oh, but if there is, if you’re listening,
if you understand my cries through my weeping,

deliver us, O Lord, from heads of state who walk on faces,
save us from all small politicians
who do the bidding of bankers,
who grow fat from the economies of war.

And may the wisdom of our spiritual lineages
rise and walk under no banner, but truth,
and may we fight the worst with our best.

Then, let commissars and presidents fall, headlong,
into the shame of their own making,

let the Generals be confounded,
by the laughter rising from old women,
and by the singing coming from the young,

and let soldiers everywhere, refuse their orders,
drop their arms and return to their mothers.

~

Hymn to the Redwoods

Posted on by stephen t berg / 18 Comments

These trees, I do not understand. I speculate their ancient wisdom, their fame for holding, in the tight folds of their rings, tectonic shifts, memories of empires, stories of great beasts, today’s quarreling blue jays.

I stop beside a particularly impressive one and take a picture. I was here! exclaims the picture.

Over there, one from the Renaissance, a youngster, and there in a hollow, one from the time of Charlemagne, and this one, I lean on, from Constantine.

Centuries of monastic listening, sifting the air for mist, tracking the movement of light, has furnished them with a deep quiet strength, open to conversion, able to wade the leveling floods, endure the storms of fire, scores of killing droughts — surviving everything, prayerfully, even the clamor of humans.

And here I am, picayune tourist, hoping to trade on something large, enlargening, pocket a bit of old-growth repose for my existential resume.

But I stop. Pause. Call up my inner sparrow and place my cheek on a cleft of bark, ancient as the time of Christ, and as inscrutable, and wait.

This long journey out of the self, with all its detours, its dark thickets, its wash-outs and stoic winters, what drives it?

Even this diluvial Sequoia, at the crack of germination, was kissed by death (and did not flinch to kiss it back).

I look up, even the lowest limb is unreachable, hidden by height.

These trees. And all I know is that I like it here. Wandering among them, wondering at them like a newborn, watching the pleated light of a noonday sun jazz the matted floor with mottled yellows, sweet as jelly beans. Giving me one more March day.

Peace

Palm Desert

Posted on by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

I’m looking over a golf course in Palm Desert,
the sprinklers have quit, the sun is up, the mowers are out,

as are the dog walkers,
and there is no war here,

and the queen palms and date palms
lean over the asphalt paths like young toughs,

but there is no inner-city here, no ghetto, not that kind,
only a mallard that has 40 acres of lawn to itself,

and last night I dreamt of angels,
not the guardians of cities, with swords aflame,

but of gardens, a thrush on a branch,
a hummingbird in a land of begonias,

and the hummingbird said,
the apocalypse is not the end,

but an integer of hope, and when I awoke,
an unwarranted calmness overcame me

and I read a morning psalm
which seemed to be saying,

the acknowledgement of fear, the owning of doubt,

is already a kind of peace,
and in that cock-crow space,

I could imagine a kind of cleansing
from the victories of my ego, the ashes of selfishness,

and when I turned to look out
I saw the darkness melt

saw life, brilliantly crawling out of the sea,
saw the world turn itself inside out,

and though I came late,
I joined the mushrooming throngs insisting on peace,

such peace, as is here in the desert,
a Mediterranean gecko, motionless, under the awning,
in the absolution of dawn.

Art/Poetry/Prayer

A friend who talks to God

Posted on by stephen t berg / 21 Comments

 

I have a friend who talks to God. Literally, audibly, lifts his head and speaks into the air, prays devoutly, believes it makes all the difference.

Prayer, like art, he says, is formed through friction. It’s a hard yearning, he says, a beggar scanning for home on some opposite shore, a traveler’s recurring dream of an aerial bridge.

We sat, once, in one of his praying spots, an abandoned rowboat, beached and battered.

We smoked Maduros and watched the ebbing evening tide empty the estuary.

In time he turned and said with all tenderness (not a question), what use is your poetry if it fails to meet the cries of war-torn mothers, dying children.

I had been watching a Blue Heron, standing, as though, alone and silent in her own small room, a figure of truth, a flagpole bearing singular loyalty to the stillness of the present moment — and I was undone.

Then he said, by way of comfort and guidance, watch the gulls move through the sea haze, see how they balance sight and instinct — follow that with the nib of your pen.

That is how I pray. I come to this boat and sit, the soles of my feet through the holes in the hull, on shale and shells, and I breathe

to match the tide, slow as the estuary. And the prayer comes as groaning, spears my own heart, then turns, and I follow its grace and compassion into the burning world.