by Francesc Parcerisas | Translated from the Catalan by Cyrus Cassells
or the daughter of water and dreaming.
Scattered ashes never settle between us.
A bile arriving, yellow and forceful
from the road, is only a truck
transporting our discomfort
with clattering, empty bottles.
While children squeal
on the brisk shore, seeking
impossible tucked-away treasures
among beach rocks that the wind
flecks with fine blood,
grab fear by the belt
and hurl it above the waves.
A cotton-soft rain will arrive
and a summer-clement, morning sky,
and the sun will suffuse everything—
now that you detect
the round pupils of a man
hanging from a cherry-tree.
No, send me back to the time
when you weren’t part of me.
Grant me a tranquil sleep,
bereft of fear,
and let the fruit be
ardent, vermilion,
until it fills our mouths
without any slices or ashes.
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.