1

Mercy is in retrograde
Where leniency should be granted
Instead, there is a harshness
A punishing wind
Smashing down the crops
Uprooting trees
And troubling the tides
Brisk
As if
To say the world is too soft
And therefore shall be made hard

2

Show me mercy
Do not give me mercy
Show it to me
Show me what it looks like when you do mercy towards another
Do not do mercy towards me
Let me see how much kindness and goodness you’ve cultivated in yourself
By how well you can reach inside and get a handful
and gently rub it on aching shoulders
Though your own shoulders ache
Though you need the kindness yourself
Though you are starved for something good
Show me your mercy
Spill it everywhere

3

The greatest Mercy I’ve ever had the good fortune to know
Walked with a cane she received after a car accident

We drove through the night to tell D.C. that war was a choice, and a bad one

Went to Jamaica and when I told Mercy of the pot I’d bought
She said she was pleased that I was having the full Jamaican experience

Great Mercy pounded on lecterns and recited Shakespeare
Transmitted love of James Baldwin that she’d received more directly than a first-degree relic
Having passed liquor bottles and cigarettes and stories with him all through a night
Offering him, in all his homosexual glory in those racist homophobic times
An opportunity to preach at  the pulpit; to which he declined but melted from her
And after surgery, I went to her to read her The Fire Next Time and we cried together
She who gave the prisoners the same love of language that she gave to sleepy university students
With all zeal, laughter, and tenderness
She, who walked a man with schizophrenia through a degree with soft palms and an open office door
Later, the three of us eating tacos, and she telling me how much sweet John loves me and hangs on every conversation we share
As I hang on every great conversation and word and deed and grace she shares with me
And in her aging
Perhaps now
She lifts a banjo
Which she never learned to play
And plunks away
With something in her as open
As no grudge ever held
Can let a person be

4

I carry an immense, longstanding sadness
There is a struggle which must be won
Where the stakes are to be merciful with myself
To unburden the load

5

If the French word for thank you
Is nearly identical to the English word mercy
What implications can be enjoyed
When considering the relationship
Between gratitude and gentle justice

6

What mercy resides
In the deep whistle
Of a 2:53 a.m. train
Hauling many minutes of goods

Who can tell what, exactly, only by rhythmic rumble?

Remember those times so long ago
When we made sacred moments of train crossings
Opening the windows and turning off the engine
For as many moments as waiting required
And the magnitude moved through us
And communion was had
In vibrations of steel
country wind
And railroad ties

What a mercy resides in the freight or passenger cars that roll by
In distant places and undeclared times
Remind either one of us
That we were young once
And had a spirituality of trains

7

Why didn’t Mercy kill the man
With heart disease
Or choke him with french fries
Before he had a chance
To walk into a synagogue
With a gun and shoot