Crow Island Offering: an Ekphrastic

BY CATHY WITTMEYER

When my boy failed to come home tonight, 

I looked to the painter holding up to the light,

in a right hand, a purple aster as viewfinder.

Is the painter seeking answers in the slate-

blue bay, in deeper depths or morning glow’s 

reflection on the gentle waves? What is there

in the starburst streaks of heliotrope & white?

The faded lavender stripes in a baby’s blue iris?

The yellow-tinged green leaves, his eyes turning

clever? The stem is a frame within the artist’s

border within the framer’s matte and frame. 

It is a map. A divining branch seeking a way

from a rocky shore beyond the islands at the

horizon’s lit up edge. Flower petals become

transparent in the sun, held up like a candled

egg to see through, to see one through, to

get through this. Go on! the painter says in his 

shades of grey and blue acrylic on canvas. Go!

Crow Island Offering is an acrylic painting by Christopher Mir.

Crow Island is an inhabited island located in New Bedford Harbor in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.

Cathy Wittmeyer is a poet, mother, lawyer and engineer from Buffalo, New York who currently lives in Liechtenstein. She earned her MFA in poetry from Carlow University in 2020 after her time at Maine Media in the Summer of 2017.