Virginia Woolf

A Poem

The plates carry food, ships on the table you and Mrs. Ramsay sat together and she painted and painted Leonard knows you so well, to say nothing of Nessa I’d love to steer you around a long walking walk and hear your mouth turn the air with violin hands along your lovely ears I’d marry, match your words to paper the inkwell holding its breath as you write away, away you go ahead of me and I insist on waiting, if just to myself to watch you move like someone who knows another century the one to come, someone who’s done the brickwork for so many of us who want to breathe as you have, suffer as you have, soared as you have we earned any of that yet it is a matter of notebooks, and papers, and thrown away texts, abandoned scratched out, rewritten, woven on threads that unravel from emotions we tried to name and tried again and in the middle of the thing the thing itself stood up, with other standing up things, stood out looked, made plans, to create, to get in a boat and to land at a lighthouse