Who is Ophelia? She wonders
As she studies the blank canvas
Of her face. The mirror
Will not answer; she wishes something
Would, some part of her would know
The answer to her question
But she was not written that way
She was not written to be anything
Other than a canvas for someone
Else’s wants. She thinks she ought
To try to be something else but she’s
Fairly certain she cannot be
And now she is summoned to play
The role of her father’s tool
The hysteric girl watching her former
Love in the pinnacle of his madness
Evidently, Ophelia is heartbroken
Who is Ophelia? She begins to
Believe that the more appropriate
Question is “what.” Who implies
That she is someone at least, but
She’s beginning to doubt that. She
Is the object, the object of his love,
The object of their deception, where
Is the object of her existence?
“Your father is dead” someone reports
And Ophelia is torn apart
She loved her father and is free
She wants him back and she
Wants to be
someone new
But she is too unmoored
Evidently, Ophelia knows not what to be
Who is Ophelia? Asked too many times
She feels it is superfluous Everything
Is superfluous This world apparently
Has no place for Ophelia the question
Ophelia the unknown, Ophelia the unpredictable
She goes to ask of her father’s death
And finds herself singing of lovers unburied
But no one understands because Evidently
Ophelia is mad. Can they not see the
Method in her movements? Can they not see
The meaning behind her words? She feels
Alone, they do not even try
To read her or know her
It is just a song, it is just a way
To tell you I am lost, but no one listens
Easier to pretend she has no mind
They’re used to that story after all.
Who is Ophelia? Someone who no
Longer wants to be in a world where
She is no one. No one, she is very much
No one for if no one can hear her is
She anything more than the wind passing through the
Leaves? Even the wind is better, it
Leaves a mark, where she is written in
Water. Well if water she is, to water
She will return. Tired of being the observer
The weapon
The audience and never the actor
Mermaid-like, she will be described as later
An accident, they will say her
Drowning was. They will debate whether she
Even deserved last rites and accuse her of
Throwing away a life created at God’s hand
But was it a life? Could there have been a life?
She asks the water as it slips over her, but
It does not answer. Ophelia is unmoored,
Ophelia is free, Ophelia will sink beneath
The sea.
Who was Ophelia? A dimensionless girl
Loved for all the images projected onto
Her face but lacking any part to call her
Own. A body deanimated long before
She halted the machinery that ran it
Ophelia, beloved for all the wrong reasons
Ophelia, who never lived
Nothing but a shade.