Of Virginia Woolf

‘We are the words. We are the music. We are the thing itself.’ Moments of Being

Are we the things we think we are?
Or is there another music
with words we have never heard?
Something close to the heart
becomes the essence of us,
a truth enabling the sense to be
what is spoken, what is sung.
This sound evades the silence.
There lies the fear within,
of never being believed.

Imagine a room with no view.
There was once a door, but no more.
The candle flame dies in time,
leaving her known by inference alone,
immersed in darkness, drowning.
She lives as a possible Ophelia
written by the poet’s sister
in a tragedy enacted
to catch the conscience unawares.
She describes the scene in detail

Wax has stained the escritoire,
and ink has faded on the page,
the pen having fallen from her fingers.
So many lives are lost
in the house of false promise.
A picture invites the eye to enter.
Figures, familiar, are seen to move
with the changing of light
that may impress the unbelieving.
Her room is opened at last.

– Geoffrey Heptonstall