Danielle Mckinney, Mercy (detail), featured in AGNI 103
The Hurricane
Culebra Island, Puerto Rico, 1989
All the windows are guileless and open to the sea,
the murmur of Atlantic coral:
smash them,
smash them with your song,
wild to the Western ear—
And who are you,
with your stripping punches—
you’re uprooting the palms,
you’re tearing the leaves—
oh what you love is the skeletal—
and who am I,
that you would take my verdant snake,
my blessed island,
and dash it to pieces?
If this day, this aftermath,
is a thorny school,
the sere light and the day,
then what is the lesson in it?
That the gift is always imperilled?
That the swart, surviving horses,
the veteran palms
seem more alive now, more alive?—
In the iron, gargantuan hush:
medicine and smithereens,
a fierce concentration
on cherishing the living.
From spirit back to spirit again;
dash it to pieces, Creator, Destroyer,
you pirate god, Huracán,
with your ferocious gangplank,
your pitiless and raucous
wind-that-will-ensure-grief—
And yet it dares to be born,
mud-fresh, mud-fresh,
like a foal,
amid the wreckage, the bankruptcy:
from spirit into flesh again:
resilience.
Cyrus Cassells
Cyrus Cassells, the 2021–22 poet laureate of Texas, is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982–2022 (Texas Christian University Press, 2025) and Lorca to the Umpteenth Power (3: A Taos Press, 2026). He is the translator from Catalan of To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu (2023) and Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas (2019). Both volumes, published by Texas A&M University Press, won the Texas Institute of Letters’ biennial Souerette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book. The Man with the Oar on His Shoulder: Poems of Francesc Parcerisas received honorable mention in the Stephen Mitchell Prize for Excellence in Translation and will appear in 2027. Cassells’s honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the National Poetry Series, an NAACP Image Award nomination, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a Regents’ Professor of English at Texas State University. (updated 10/2026)
Cassells’s AGNI poem “Elegy with a Gold Cradle” was chosen for The Best American Poetry 2017.