Home Literary Arts Two Poems by Mabel Ferragut Smith

Two Poems by Mabel Ferragut Smith

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Two Poems by Mabel Ferragut Smith

To the Poet—S. K.—

on Channel WNET-13

Your unexpected

radiance lightens the gloom

in Brooklyn. You hunch;

you sit by the sea.

Rumbling like the rumpled waves,

your voice splashes me.

Your eyes incite play,

defy hundred-year-old skin,

though every crease hears

death’s whisper. You dawn

on me. Spilled from my vessel,

adrift,

I drink your words,

like the ocean drinks the light

of raging sunset.

Factually

facts

are

stones:

quiet,

unchangeable

context.

if you turn

a stone

in your hand,

it presents

different aspects

of itself

if you look

at the fifteen stones

in the garden of 

Ryōan-ji, you will see

only fourteen, no matter

where you stand.

if you submerge

a stone, its color

will intensify,

even transform,

without changing

the fact of stone.

if you suppress

stone, pressurize

a molten fact,

it will erupt

in unanticipated ways.

if you holler

in a canyon, stone

will reverberate with echoes.

stone is more ancient than words,

as deep as bedrock, oceanic crust, iron core

as broad as spinning planets circling a universe of stars.

like truth, like love, a fact is the pebble in your shoe, the jewel in your palm.

Mabel Ferragut Smith believes that poems are tendrils that coil between strangers, weaving secret, precise, intimate connections. She writes and reads in pursuit of that moment when the right poem meets the right reader, and magic happens. In addition to writing, she has worked as a choreographer and an architect. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two children, where she is the keeper of a Cuban heritage and beautiful dances, with a tiny forest in the background. She has poetry in Little Patuxent Review. Find her online at mabelferragutsmith.com or @MabelWrites.

Image by PumpkinSky – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61356182

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