by Francesc Parcerisas | Translated from the Catalan by Cyrus Cassells
Sullied red, frankincense red,
the red of gold and rubies.
To turn the calf, he plunges his hand
to the placenta.
He bites his nails, heedless, fatigued.
Meanwhile snow falters
all at once on the mountain peak’s arête,
or in this spoonful flecked
with pale, syringe-ready powder.
Long ago there were men
in leather jackets; women
with breast-shielding shoulder straps,
books with wispy endpapers,
a child bawling inside a hut…
these too were the years
of their will. It’s easy enough
to identify their flames.
And the waiting at the cave-mouth
and the gifts: gold, frankincense, myrrh.
The protagonist’s a blue-shirted man,
a bona fide critic, a believer,
or a bratty cynic whose sale price
is a cool 80 million:
I’m selling you the country, the souls,
the corrupt working-class,
I’m hawking the saints’ blood,
the whores’ tombs, the fatherland…
And you seek your father’s face
among soldiers crossing the Ebro River,
or among those in flight, capes
over their shoulders, among carts
and eviscerated mules
on the careworn Ginestar road.
Consigned to homelessness,
the defeated and exiled
can’t yet grasp the cost,
that in the future what they’ll engender
is their melancholy progeny’s gaze,
disclosing only oblivion’s pride,
and justice’s intoxicating fumes.
There will be nothing now.
The hard-driven kneel
before the cave,
or on the gritty shoreline
facing the firing-squad.
The muddy water drags,
beneath the boat’s harmless shadow,
the corpses of those
even younger than you, Reader.
You who must be aware
of civil war and its genesis,
witnesses who’ve observed the magi
kneeling with their offerings,
grasping even in propitious times,
just how clandestine and reliable
is the Three Wise Men’s nocturnal justice.
Born in 1944, Francesc Parcerisas, the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Still Life with Children, Triumph of the Present, and The Golden Age, is considered the premier Catalan poet of his generation—a “miracle generation” of poets who came of age as Franco’s public banning of the Catalan language came to an end. He is also a masterly, award-winning translator of an impressive array of significant international writers, including T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Katherine Mansfield, Joyce Carol Oates, Cesare Pavese, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Rimbaud, Susan Sontag, William Styron, and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. Among his numerous translations from French, Italian, and English into Catalan, he is most famous in Catalonia for his translation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. His own poems have been translated into Basque, English, French, Gallego, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, and Welsh, among others.
Cyrus Cassells, the 2021 Texas Poet Laureate, is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The World That the Shooter Left Us (Four Way Books: 2022), Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? (Four Way: 2024); Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982-2022 (TCU Press: 2025), and Lorca to the Umpteenth Power (3: A Taos Press: 2026), a prose and poetry memoir rooted in Federico García Lorca’s Granada, featuring art by 2025 Texas Poet Laureate Octavio Quintanilla.
Cassells is the translator from Catalan of Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas (Stephen F. Austin State University Press: 2019); and To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu (Stephen F. Austin: 2023). Both volumes garnered the Texas Institute of Letters’ biennial Souerette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book. Cassells’s honors include the 2025 Jackson Poetry Prize given by Poets & Writers, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, an NAACP Image Award nomination, two NEA grants, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a Regents’ and University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University.