Wild Mercy

Wild Mercy (www.wildmercy.com and www.myspace.com/wildmercyband) started as a vocal-and-instrumental duo (Jen Midkiff on Celtic harp, Debbie Gates on keyboard and percussion) playing "eclectic Celtic" ("trad" and contemporary Scots-Irish) music. In 2002, Barry and Sally Childs-Helton joined the band (on bass/guitar and drums/percussion respectively), and brought in the subversive influence of filk, which resonated magically in a band full of avid SF readers.

Things quickly got out of hand from there. Jen picked up an electric bass (switching off with Barry), Debbie gathered a small arsenal of guitars (ditto), and by 2004, WM had started playing concerts at cons -- InConJuncTion, ConClave, DucKon, Ohio Valley Filk Fest, Capricon, Marcon, Conterpoint, ConText -- in addition to their periodic appearances at Celtic festivals, art fairs, museums, parks, libraries, weddings, anniversary and graduation parties, and smoky pseudo-Irish bars.

Their filk repertoire burgeoned (along with their collective addiction to all that attentive, high-quality fannish listening) as their style continued to sprout more rock, jazz, and choral elements. Now all four band members are doing concerts (solo or in various combinations) at conventions, and happily haunting the filk rooms.

The band produced their first CD, Summer Storm, in 2003, followed by Furious Fancies in 2005. The new CD, Dream of a Far Light (2008) is Barry's complete song cycle that began with "Lightsailor" (1993 "Best Space Song" Pegasus Award) and chronicles a thousand-year future history of interstellar migration. They'll be headed back to the studio to cook up a new "eclectic-Celtic-filk-rock-gumbo" CD sometime in the much-nearer future.

Representative work for the 2008 Pegasus Awards

Your Cosmos, Cavalier

Copyright Barry Childs-Helton
All Rights Reserved

Diving from your world
into the darkness, calling
Moving fast as fantasy
though hardly crawling,
Eager to be flying
but afraid of falling,
Behold your cosmos, cavalier.

Riding off the rim
to where the systems scatter,
Leave your wheel of starlight,
watch it turn and tatter.
Drawn and driven in the dance
of mind and matter,
behold your cosmos, cavalier.

Shine like a comet¹s hair,
rise like a solar flare
flee what you presage.
Stupor of atrophy,
dreams of catastrophe,
transmute their message.
Would you capture the sky
inside a crystal flask?
Would you tear off the martyr¹s
sacrificial mask?
If you¹re dross driven out by fire,
how dare you ask:
Is it your turn?
(When are you free to learn?)
Silent and cold where you¹re heading
Calling, exulting, and dreading.
Victim of gravity, slave of mortality,
inconsequential
thousand-year fever-dream,
only a fleeting gleam
of your potential.
Does a grain of infinity
abrade your sleep?
Can a spark of divinity
escape your keep?
Are your small steps converging
to a giant leap
across the boundary?
(What have you found to be?)

Gradual as a glacier
or as vague as vapor,
Can you feel your skills expand
and slowly taper,
sculpture from the starlight
both the shape and shaper?
Behold your cosmos, cavalier.

Time and distance topple
like two pillars breaking,
split the past like doors of glass
that cage your waking,
if you dare to risk your ruin
and remaking,
behold your cosmos, cavalier.

Errant menagerie,
blue world your hatchery,
jailed but persistent...
earth, water, fire, and air,
fragment of everywhere,
frail but resistant...
if a harnessed apocalypse
propels you out,
incandescent acceleration
roaring doubt
like a star¹s dead defiance
in its ancient shout,
are you set free?
(Some other century...)
Rising from the rack of your history,
joy and fear melt into mystery.
Fleeting magnificence, curious ignorance,
heart like a furnace...
Static of innocence, whisper of sentience,
blind when you burn this...
Cast like a wind-blown seed,
chasing your unknown need
out through the night...
Cubs wander from the den,
five thousand years or ten,
still dying, but till then,
safe journey and amen...on to omega.

Part the veil of distance
in a gentle rending
like a ray through gemstone
or a blue note bending,
move to vaster music
with no start or ending:
Behold your cosmos, cavalier.

Whether dreamt or ever done,
this visitation
trance or truth, adventure
or hallucination
night skies are a lighted list
of destinations:
Behold your cosmos, cavalier.