It's Still Life

The Garden of Ordinary Apocalypses

“The Old Woman Wakes the Crow”
(an ekphrastic poem after Caspar David Friedrich’s painting “The Tree of Crows/Raven Tree,”)

The crow’s nightmare was this:
a tree split open like a ribcage,
its branches—vertebrae of dusk,
its roots clutching a bell
that only rings for roots.

“Hush,” says the old woman,
peeling a lychee with her knife.
“You’ve confused the painting
for your own bones.”

She spits a pit into her palm,
lobs it at the lich-gold moon—
a sound so small
it unknots the crow’s wings.

“Look,” she whispers,
pointing to the real tree
outside her window—
its bark soft as a lung,
its leaves humming—
we are here, we are here—
even as the wind tries to scrape
them loose.

The crow cocks its head.
“But the dark is just—”
“—a place of wings,” she says,
“where breath grows teeth
in the space between names.”

She offers the crow a slice
of her shadow to line a nest
in murmuring glyphs.
“Next time you dream,
paint yourself into the bark.
Be the thing that bends
when the wind lies.”

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For Day 9 of April’s PAD: write an ekphrastic poem. This series is in the style of The Dead Man poems by Marvin Bell and The Aleph (Spanish: El Aleph 1945), a short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges.

Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Images are copyright and not to used without permission, which I willingly give when asked, and when not for commercial use. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2025.