Lumen in coelo, José María Velasco, 1892

Father, forgive me for I have opened my eyes.
Last night, in the fields,
I lay down where the valley ought to be
to think of death,
but it was usurped by the scotch broom
horizon of your hand. Instead, I fell asleep
amongst the stubborn wools
and the whips germinating from the barren land.
Forgive me the thirst of the newborn lamb,
the rocks of the ravine threshing
like ochre splinters,
soot-stained glass above us.
Without knowing what light feels like, the shepherd
is nothing but a mirage
on the crust of this cracked canvas.
Ignorant of the fall, the muddied shepherd
is now but a shorn skein.
Allow me to resume the prayer
and dissolve your name from my fingertips.
Father, I had closed my eyes so tight
that, upon opening them, I drank the black
blur of dawn. There is a cumulus
of hunchbacked pastures,
or a horizon barely grazed
by the one-eyed sun.
The hours counted or still,
the sky giving back
the dignity of the cramped, bareback spine,
the serf remembering that he, too,
can lose his voice,
the skeins splitting
only to merge into one.
Tell me my feet
could still have sunk
deeper into that mud,
that I should have inhabited
the shape of my own weight.
Tell me that this, too, is
a form of pilfered radiance,
a firefly in the black shard.

Genaro Aguilar Saucillo is a Mexican poet, editor-in-chief and founder of Paratextos, and a poetry reader for Fahmidan Journal. Paratextos was a finalist for Chill Subs & CLMP’s 2025 Literary Magazine Incubator. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Trampset, dialogist, Santa Rabia Poetry, Rattle, and Nueva Poesía (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2026). They are the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Jauría.