' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' A Word Too Far? (For Scarlett) Poem by Dónall Dempsey

The sparkler
amazed the dark

with the beauty
of itself.

The child
held it

with all the wonder
it could muster.

The dark
seemed scared

of it.

There were no words
to describe

how it lit up
our little minds.

“FULGENT! ”
her father proclaimed

as if he had been
reading my mind.

“FULGENT! ”
I said
(as if I had misheard) .

“You know...
bright...shinning...radiant! ”

He carefully constructed
his trap of words

to capture
the experience.

I hadn’t
known.

I wished I didn’t
know now.

I had loved it
in a wordless way.

I looked
at the dictionary bobbing

in his throat
pretending to be an Adam’s apple


secretly hating him
for naming it.

The child sensibly
not letting it past the whorl of her ear

continued
to look at it

(like I)
beyond words and only

in wonder.