Ophelia, by Ed Higgins

Her ghost
kept coming back
to Hamlet
maybe driving him
mad as well who knows

trailed by pale regret
and her sad specter
(haunted undersea dreams
of the innocent drowned)

his mist-thin love
incapable of saving her
but oh, her fair fey hair
glistening, floating there

lost love’s shudder rising
over Elsinore’s
blood-hazed moon.

Death’s deep chill
moaning loudly
this ghostly loss too.

Denmark’s knowing
defects of weather–
winds blowing cold
north-by-northwest

warning of darker skies
coming still.

Ed Higgins’ poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals. He and his wife live on a small farm in Yamhill, OR, where they raise a menagerie of animals including two whippets, two manx barn cats (who don’t care for the whippets), an emu named To & Fro, and a pair of alpacas named Machu & Picchu. Ed teaches writing and literature at George Fox University, south of Portland, OR.

© 2012, Ed Higgins