Easter/Peace

Passion Week, Easter and Two Memories of a Tricycle

Posted on by stephen t berg / 11 Comments

It’s late spring and the leaves of poplars are deepening from lime-green to mint. I am on my tricycle in the shallow depression between the house and the barn, watching my brothers and sister and our cousins play hide-and-seek.

It’s early evening and the farm has settled down, by which I mean the cows are in the pasture and the black dog is sleeping under the porch and the red barn and white tractor and fenced yard with a meadowlark on the gate post has set me in the middle of a shimmering land full of wondrous secrets.

In growing twilight I watch human silhouettes stalk, crawl, creep, then suddenly I hear racing feet and shrieks of laughter. I grip the handlebars of my tricycle until the moon burns itself  into the long grass and the rust-tinged machinery turns silver and a voice calls me inside.

Fifty years later I am in Japan with my eldest son. It’s Easter. The cherry blossom festivals have ended and we have come to the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. Behind a glass panel is the heat-withered remnant of a tricycle, and above, I see pictures of children resembling fallen silhouettes.

~

And here we are again in the middle of Passion Week, also known as Holy Week, in a world still ruled by lust for dominance. (Half-consciously maintained by a feudal wrath-appeasing-blood-payment myth, leveraged as licence to act upon our own wrath and call it God, while blinding us to an ocean of love that longs to heal our hearts.)

One day, if Easter is true, we will all start crying — unable to stop until our fearful, envious, resentful, rapacious, hiroshima-hearts have broken open; until the poplars green and the moon and meadowlark begin to sing and we are at peace, sitting together on the porch steps of sunrise.

Joy/Love/Peace/Spirituality

Too late in the day for regret

Posted on by stephen t berg / 12 Comments

Too late in the day for regret:
those years of lysergic and Lebanese,
of mushrooms and Millers,
when we knew,
despite the fugue of dissipation
in the theatre of the prodigal,
we were close to striking some vein of truth.
 
Always on the brink of some form of deliverance
or decimation:
free in the unio mystica of naked limbs,
or snared by some base hunger;
transfigured by a night swim in a bioluminescent bay,
or sinking under the sentence of a stone-eyed sun;
on route to liking some part of ourselves
taking shape in the haze,
or staggering into thickening dread.

That it should happen:
those years of locust liberated by a love story,
our mouths full of laughter,
our circus suits flung into the gorse,
our guitars and grainy photos packed for travel,
to walk, arm in arm,
out on the wild rim of happy;
who would have guessed that?

Hope/Love/Pain

Crossing the Strait of Georgia

Posted on by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Crossing the Strait of Georgia on the Queen of Coquitlum,
Vancouver Island rising into the deepening colours,
passing through all the stages of peach, coral, then purple,
the water fathering out from the prow
to unsettle, minutes later, the occasional sail boat or fishing boat
bearing for Departure Bay,

and standing on the top deck where the wind is stiff,
I lean in and hang on to the rail
and think about one near my heart
who has endured, already,
storms enough,

and I think of Christ on the waves
who would have walked right past that pitching reeling boat,
but the story has the disciples calling out
and he stops, climbs in,
and everything calms down.

Now the stewards arrive and put covers on the windows
and the ferry will dock for the night,
and we will walk down the gangway to the parking lot,

and I will go on calling to my children
the only thing I know
(and hope to God is true): “It’s the storms
that make you buoyant. It’s the storms
that hold you up.”

Beauty/Music

Sometimes I think about Eva Cassidy

Posted on by stephen t berg / 14 Comments

Sometimes I think about Eva Cassidy
whose voice was ointment to me,
who sang cover songs,
painting them with her own soaring colours
while honouring their creators.

Whose interpretation of Time after Time, Wade in the Water,
Woodstock, Autumn Leaves and Fields of Gold,
pulled me through
two years in a windowless office
where I thought my life had abruptly been buried.

Later, when I looked her up and found that she died of melanoma
in 1996 when she was just 33, I’m not ashamed to say
I closed the door, sat in the dark and welled up.

Sometimes I hear Eva,
above the cries of the city,
sing into the shadows of night,
and think that if there is any justice,
any purpose, any fulfillment of beauty,
she’s alive somewhere other than in my failing memory,
preserved, rearranged, re-covered by divine memory,
alive and dusting the molting earth with her own atoms.

And maybe I have proof of that.
Because the other morning
I was awakened by someone singing
and found that it was me.