A.A. Marcoff

The Works of the Woolf

Inspired by the ballet “Woolf Works” by Wayne McGregor, music composed by Max Richter

these are the works of Virginia Woolf, and this is dance, this is England, and silences and farewells and love, love, love: there are so many memories, passions, and I loved him, and I loved him, and I loved him: he did not live: and there were meetings in the garden, and meetings again after the hiatus of that brutal war: they weave through the shadows, to an anthem of war and peace: a sense of loss, ghosts, old encounters, the grace and curve that is bird—its wing gliding through the world like fire: it evokes so much about the nature of existence, about the tragedy of the wind and the water: they move, men and women to whom time is apportioned, like ceremony, like living and loving and being, in the curve that is world and wing and shadow…

and these are appearances, the old and the young, the young and the old, in so many lives shown on a stage, reels of film from some old cinema, with a set from a Rothko painting, but hollow, with shadow, with fleeting impressions: and she is grasping for the past, reaching out for it, and she is moving, and she is beautiful: and when rain falls, it will fall always, and the rain will rain in our dreams and presages and moments: and it is a dance of dragonfly, butterfly, egret, swan and crane, and the dancers come in waves, with all the heartache, after the trenches, and I hear a voice: I am Ferri, ballerina of worlds, full of grace and wave and rain and verve:

people come & go
those I loved
those I lost
those I longed for
this world of light & shadow

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About the Author

A.A. (Tony) Marcoff is an Anglo-Russian poet who has lived in Africa, Iran, France and Japan. He writes haiku, tanka, tanka prose, and mainstream poetry, and lives near the beautiful River Mole in England.

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