Virginia

When Virginia walked into the river,
Too loaded down by cobbles to have floated
Her suicide note was grossly misquoted
By Time Magazine. ‘I cannot forgive her
For surrendering to wartime malaise,’
Responded a self-satisfied archdeacon:
‘Shall we follow suit and helplessly weaken,
Step, arms raised, into the Hadean blaze?

‘Not so…!’ Time, Leonard shot back, had distorted
Terror at the approach of insanity
Into purely onanistic vanity:
Were they proud at having thus misreported…?
Further deepening the article’s stain,
Next week, unmended, it appeared again.

[Virginia Woolf took her life in March,
1941. It was her note addressed to her
husband Leonard that Time Magazine
egregiously misquoted. It is now thought
that she suffered from bipolar disorder.
Among her antecedents and relatives,
mental illness was common.]

Ingrid

Falsely accused of infidelity,
From the horn-mad head of the household shorn,
Ingrid Jonker’s mother slid into beggary
And madness, before her daughter was born.
He, a pro-apartheid M.P., once more
Inflamed when Ingrid, grown, denounced his views,
Got to his feet in the chamber and swore
She wasn’t his, snatching the front-page news.

Prize-winning poet now, unreconciled
To her father’s corundum-hearted curse,
She saw the shooting death of a black child,
Spewed it out in incendiary verse
And, seeing no way on but self-remotion,
Walked on resolute legs into the ocean.

[Ingrid Jonker, winner of the Afrikaans
Press-Booksellers literary prize, in 1963,
died two years later, at the age of thirty-
one. Remotion means removal.]

Peter Austin is a retired professor of English who spends his time writing stage plays for young people and poems for adults. Of his second collection, X. J. Kennedy (winner of the Robert Frost award for lifetime contribution to poetry) said, “He must be one of the best living exponents of the fine old art of rhyming and scanning in English.”