Ophelia- Amisha Kumar, senior

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.