Caesars and Dreamers
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- 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 [End Page 18]
in our hardscrabble dreams, sang it as sweat-drenched
unshakable halleluiah, 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? [End Page 19]
Cyrus Cassells, Professor of English at Texas State University (San Marcos), is author of five collections of poems, The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path Through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, More Than Peace and Cypresses, and The Crossed-Out Swastika (Copper Canyon Press, April 2012). His Still Life with Children, translations from the poet Francesc Parcerisas, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. He has also published in a number of periodicals, including Boston Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, and Callaloo. For his poems he has won a number of awards, including the William Carlos Williams Award and the Lambda Literary Award. He lives in Paris, France, and Austin, Texas.
