Ekphrastic poetry by Camille LeFevre
“Wither” is an ekphrastic eco-poem inspired by “Dorset” by Minerva Cuevas.
Wither
-- after “Dorset,” by Minerva Cuevas, 2016 Wither the docile Dorset, a tribe swathed in sealskin, wielding walrus tusk and sharpened stone — was their extinction Inuit, or melting ice? Wither the unwary colossi, saber-toothed and woolly, thrashing through steaming ponds of bubbling tar — who was predator, what was trap? Wither the innocent seabirds slickening, sickening in sheens of tanker-spilled crude — what cost is weighed, for whom? Wither the last dinosaur bones, fossils liquefied to fuel, powering the plastic, pavements, the petroleum aftermath, even — chapopote seep for coating oil- painted seascapes roiling pearly toward oblivion — then witness the sky’s lenticular portal, gouged by a nauseous sun, warm Arctic ice to tarnished gold, and witness asphalt’s necrotic wake drip and pit into ruinous pitch as we wither, witness the last breath of our all.
Link: Erica Goss: "Dorset,” Minerva Cuevas (Mexican), oil on canvas dipped in chapapote, 2016.
Camille LeFevre writes poetry and creative nonfiction. She teaches ekphrastic writing workshops in galleries and arts writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her ekphrastic work has appeared in Unleash Lit, Metphrastic, Poets for Science, and The Ekphrastic Review. In 2023, she was awarded the Scuglik Memorial Residency in ekphrastic writing at Write On, Door County, in Wisconsin. She lives in Northern Arizona, where she writes, hikes, studies Indigenous rock art, and swims in cold-water creeks.