It's Still Life

1 May: Brigid and the Crow of Glen Affric

Glen Affric, Scotland – The sun turns its back on the hills as Brigid presses open a new page in her journal, and she writes:

do not paint the crow,
nor the pine’s rough bark,
nor the loch’s shattered mirror of sky.

paint in-betweens—
the silence where wing meets air,
the exact instant a thought becomes a shape,
the hollow where a human mind
presses against the crow’s knowing.

“Will my hand remember what my heart has never quite forgotten—” (she faces the canvas again, her hand hesitates, then the brush spills—not feathers, not fingers, but the trembling thread that connects how the crow sees angles, not as impressions or ideas, but as edges to use—and she turns each one into a question.)

the painting grows darker
than intended—
not a bridge, but a rift,
not an answer, but the ache
of asking.

“There—found it,” she whispers, in the wet gleam
of crow-black and pine-shadows:

a loneliness so precise
it could almost be wisdom,
a recognition that
she, too, is a creature
built for gaps.

Her aim—
not to fill the gaps,
but to fall in love
with the falling
into them.

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Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “impression”.  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.