Woolf Wrote in Purple Ink
and I do too but did that before
I knew and I know it’s kind of childish
but I do just like the colour, the way
it makes a signature look ─ bold,
glamourous & cursive, even when it isn’t ─
and did you know she had a book
printed all in purple for her friend Violet?
The strange thing is that she was born
on the same day as my man ─
just eighty years before him ─
that probably doesn’t really matter
either, apart from both being Aquarian,
other than she also wrote
we should all be a womanly man
or a manly woman, so in a unisex
kind of way that works too – him
not being her, of course, like I’m not
and also that stream of consciousness
way she wrote was really natty
and sort of left its purple modernist
mark, even if she wasn’t left-handed
like me, though Nicole Kidman is
and had to learn to write right
handed for The Hours before loading
her pockets with stones, oozing
into that river to become a different
kind of water-carrier but another thing
she wrote is that for centuries
or so those who signed themselves
as Anonymous were, in all likelihood,
women which is probably the reason
she signed Virginia Woolf in purple ink.
(first published in the pamphlet The Quilted Multiverse, Fair Acre Press, 2016.)
In 2015 Jill Munro had two poems long-listed for the National Poetry Competition, was short-listed for Canterbury Poet of the Year, highly commended in the Sussex Poets’ Competition & the US Princemere Poetry Prize and had her first collection, Man from La Paz published by Green Bottle Press, London. So far in 2016, she has been short-listed for the Charles Causley International Poetry Prize and won the Fairacre Pamphlet Competition with The Quilted Multiverse.
andotherpoems.com 