This month’s Versed in Florida is with poet Diego Alejandro Fernandez, an FGCU senior studying anthropology with a minor in creative writing. He spoke with WGCU’s Amy Tardif about his influences and how reading changed his style of writing.
a Christmas Card for Erica
It is impossible to drown
in the dead sea.
The irony of it rings in
with every wave,
every bundle of sunlight
chips
carried like a winter
flock of birds in swirling
and piling currents,
to be heaped
like so much gold dust
upon my feet,
pale and scarred beneath this
new color
which you invented for me.
I come upon colors that way,
as infants do words;
each brought to me
walking, a new
, human revelation.
Just so, I found blues and greens
in eyes or stinging plants,
red in blood and
lips and something
called carmine
in the suspension
of despair.
I started with white, invented by
me, in the glare of wakefulness
and insanity.
And you gave me gold.
Gave it outright in your hair,
drinking day
in subtleties of dust and mud and the shine of wood.
You gave me gold
in a forest called Black.
I carry it
to these places -
seas and deserts -
where I cannot die,
ring the brass bells
as they may.