An Offering in Blue

By Janelle Lynch

November 2024

An Offering in Blue, lyric essay published with cyanotype.

The Ekphrastic Review, Toronto, Canada,

On tiptoe, bare-breasted and bent-kneed, I laid my heart down on the table, over coated paper, under rays, and breathed while it raced. My heart. Arced over my limbs were those of a Russian olive tree, heavy with age. Naked, like me, after a long winter. But with promise.

Ten minutes, twenty. I watched the treated surface below me change in response to time and light, like my love after a long winter apart from me. A distant image emerging: chartreuse, cerulean. Silver.

I was shielded on the patio, behind the humble house on the private lane they named for whalers. Still, the April wind reached me cold. What was for others a table for summer meals, for now was one to hold an offering of another kind. A spring together again.

Like farming and fishing, whaling was an industry active here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whalers’ blubber was boiled for oil to light lamps. For lubricants. Even margarine. I recoil at the thought of the mammoth creatures I see swimming freely today hunted for their flesh, but understand the drive to do what is needed to survive.

On his own table, across centuries and the ocean at my door, a man searches for survival of a different nature. Sir John Herschel, a scientist knighted for his contributions to the stars, sought a method to capture and preserve an image.

When something matters, we want to keep it forever. We can’t let it fade.