09/23/2026
An excerpt from "Prayer" by Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan by Cyrus Cassells. Broadside by student Abbey Lam.
Born in 1944, Francesc Parcerisas 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.
Cyrus Cassells, the 2021 Texas Poet Laureate, is the author of eleven books of poetry and the translator from Catalan of Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, which garnered the Texas Institute of Letters’ biennial Souerette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book.
Full poem translation to English below:
Don’t ever forfeit the sea of objects
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.
