Cyrus Cassells’ six books are The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, More Than Peace and Cypresses,The Crossed-Out Swastika, and The Gospel according to Wild Indigo. His book of Catalan translations, Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas,is due from Stephen F. Austin State University Press in April 2019. He’s a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, a William Carlos Williams Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. He lives in Austin and teaches at Texas State University.
IS NOT (DON’T INTERRUPT THE SORROW)
Sing: a Taser is not an answer
A bullet is not a dream
There is no sunny god
In an Apollo Helmet
A livelong mercenary is not
A frisking meadow lamb
Lady Justice is no
Fearsome chimera
No lurking drone
No business-as-usual Cerberus
A callous Caesar is not
A far-seeing Christ—
*
Listen: a blazing Mississippi cross
Never presages a messiah
A daffodil in a “sundown town” never signals
The advent of spring—
*
So after two hawk-stern seasons,
I finally dared to inquire
If his father’s ousting
“Stand Your Ground” assassin
Was white, “lily-white,”
And naturally his response
In this volatile demesne
This gallery of averted eyes
And gimcrack defenders
Was yes
Dear God of course yes
*
Don’t interrupt the sorrow
A woman croons
But all I hear is the ack-ack-ack
Of ink-blotter redaction,
The X-rated sputter of a black site’s
Cuffed and Water-boarded man
Or a flailing cigarette seller
Tackled gasping for air
Jinxing arm and insignia
Marring his throat:
Is not
Is not
Is not
Is not—
in memory of Eric Garner, 1970-2014
* * *
THE SPIRITS OF SLAVE CATCHERS ARE STILL WALKING
AMONG US
Sullying your blue hood and windshield
Or sprayed on your innocuous
Chapel door,
The full-frontal blast of the N word—
See, spirits of slave catchers are still
Hectoring, ensnaring:
Astute bloodhounds on the track . . .
At the strip mall boutique,
The library story hour,
Monitoring the posh, bean-shaped pool:
Where is your pass?
Brash, oh-so-intrepid hunters
Trailing your workaday step:
Savvy collaborators,
Quick-to-call Beckys,
Tattletale belles all too avid to sip
From Whites Only fountains once more—
Robust enforcers insisting dark bodies remain
Ghetto-bound, earthbound,
Cradle-still in velvet-lined,
Elm or alder wood coffins—
Sundown towns,they’re labeled,
Because you can’t be Black after dark
And expect to make it out alive—
Say it with me: dull and cavalier
as a Dixie train’s Jim Crow curtain,
The spirits of ill-wind patterollers are still
Walking among us,
The spirits of restless slave-catchers are still
Roaming esplanades and alleyways,
Hungering, unfaltering,
The spirits of slave catchers are still . . .
* * *
CAESARS AND DREAMERS
The pharaohs of rice and indigo, the conniving
Caesars of cotton,
what were we to them?
Profitable: able
bodies from Barbados
and the Windward Coast,
the Rice Coast,
our souls ramshackle,
less than a rooster’s
or a rock’s.
And yet, in painstaking fields,
in joyous praise houses,
our tenacious “Go Down, Moses,”
our stirring, rallying
“In the beauty of the lilies
Christ was born across the sea . . .”
might have served as proof
to those zealous Southern despots
that we possessed
some quilt scrap of God.
Go tell those greed-swayed
kings of sugar, those implacable
princes of tobacco,
how we garnered freedom
in our hardscrabble dreams,
sang it as sweat-drenched,
unshakable hallelujah,
whispered it as healing salve
to allay the defiling
stripes on our backs.
Unstinting overseer,
iron-eyed Caesar,
who better to define freedom
than a slave?
* * *
THE WHITE IRIS BEAUTIFIES ME
Not the white of hard-won cotton,
or of pitiless snow—
I’ve found a whiteness
that gives me its glory;
it blooms
in Master Bellemare’s garden,
and though it is, by all accounts,
untouchable,
quiet as it’s kept, I’ve carried it
into the shabbiest of cabins,
worn it as I witnessed
the slave-breaker,
the hanging tree;
in dream-snatches
it blesses me, and I become
more than a brand,
a pretty chess piece:
at the mistress’s bell,
always prudent and afraid,
wily and afraid—
And when the day comes,
my rescuing flower’s name
will become my daughter’s;
a freeborn woman,
I swear,
she will never be shoeless
in January snow.
Bold Iris,
she will never fear sale
or the bottom of the sea.
* * *
THREE KINGS
When my belittled village was eclipsed
by pillaging soldiers.
quick as a windblown kite,
my baking aunt coaxed me
into her privy’s acrid underworld.
Banished from the flour-dusted
blossoms of her apron,
I was too green to beseech God
or beautiful Queen Esther.
Unmoored, I fastened on the bookish
name of my slingshot—
Aramis, Aramis, Aramis—
as if in that shit-drenched dark,
I could summon, abracadabra,
the slingshot’s Y-shaped, trusty wood,
and from the musketeer mantra, I acquired
a little certainty, a little stamina, a little consolation,
like resplendent kings
come to a filthy manger.
* * *
THE GIVEAWAY TRAINS
After the war, the best, the headiest charity,
Was riding on the far-reaching trains:
A Hiroshima boy
Orphaned by the pika, the flash,
A vagabond boy,
Was blessed with giveaway seats:
So a young, even jubilant Nobu
Journeyed in every direction:
North to snow-dusted, uppermost Honshu,
South to the sultry island of Kyushu,
Replenished by elating horseplay,
Chit-chat, comic books,
Windfall lunch scraps from the plates
Of generous fellow passengers—
Winsome trees, breeze-rocked reeds, towns
Hurrying behind him—
Sometimes he’d wake
In an unknown place,
Jolted from a too-vivid dream
Of Asa, his steadfast brother,
Cleaning his fetid wounds:
Day after harrowing day,
In the marred time
Following the blast,
This is the ministering love
That kept him alive—
While a train’s fleet windows
Cradle the greenest country,
A silver-haired Nobushige shares,
With frankness,
His boyhood indignities:
His mouth suffused with dust
Unsettled by the bomb;
His blackened body hauled
From home to intact home
Until he was upright.
If the raging world insists
His extensive burns,
The crushed city was meant
To save you—a barter,
Don’t accept it:
For drought-long decades
You’ve waited to glean
A once-despised enemy’s trust,
Waited for just this
Persuasive gaze,
This annealing testimony,
This plangent alloy
Of awe and truth-telling,
Because, in the fierce annals
Of less than and more than,
Everything human must be described.
* * *
Editor’s Note:
Several of the above poems have appeared in the following publications:
“Caesars and Dreamers” and “The White Iris Beautifies Me” are from The Gospel according to Wild Indigo (Southern Illinois University Press: 2018)
“Three Kings” appeared originally in The Crossed-Out Swastika(Copper Canyon Press: 2012)
“The Giveaway Trains” is an uncollected poem that appeared originally in the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art