A Dream: The Omen in the Raven’s Wing
The desert night is long, and in its depths, my garden becomes a mystical stage. Bronze figures loom in the moonlight, their silent gazes fixed on secrets only the wind knows. Here, among gnarled branches and the blooming leaves, I find myself in the company of shadows, most faithfully embodied by the ravens, owls and crows.
These night birds are not simply muses: they are omens, harbingers of a truth both terrible and beautiful. They are the ink-stained souls moving with passion. They are not the bearers of simple inspiration, but the messengers of a darker and more beautiful fate. Life is not always the poetry born of joy, but sometimes birthed from sorrow, or the constant ache of existence. It is the shadow that lies at the heart of light.
Think of the raven in Edgar Allen Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’ He asks the raven a question of great and sorrowful importance and the raven only says, “Nevermore” leaving the poet with great sadness and never-ending angst.
I, to seek answers from these midnight visitors. I sit in my studio, the large sliding doors framing a landscape drenched in the melancholy of twilight and wait for the words to come. They arrive on the breath of something hidden, in the rasping caw of a crow, or in the unsettling silence that precedes a raven’s flight. But there is always an ambiguity, a sense that the message is not entirely for me, that it’s a fragment torn from a larger, unknowable story.
“The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.” The poet Wallace Stevens offers a glimpse of something profound, but it is fleeting. The river of time carries us inexorably toward the unknown. And these blackbirds, they remind us of this. They are a constant token of the ephemeral nature of beauty. The blackbirds circle, and they will find you.
Perhaps they are psychopomps, guides to a realm I am not yet ready to enter. Or perhaps they are simply reminders that even in this private garden, amidst the abundance of life, death is always present, waiting.
The poetry that comes to me in these hours is not gentle. It is a brutal excavation, a tearing away of the veil to reveal the raw, unflinching truth. It demands a reckoning with loss, with the inevitable decay of all things. And the ravens and crows, they are the witnesses to this struggle, their obsidian eyes reflecting the darkness I find within myself. I am the garden, and the Blackbird are poems with wings.
I don’t seek solace in my poetry. I find clarity. The ravens and the crows are not comforters, they are agents of the Fates. They remind me of the fragility of existence, the inevitability of loss. And in their presence, I am allowed to confront my own personal shadows. The messenger, the Blackbird has come, and he will come again and again and again. This is why I write poetry.
Words and image © Gesso Cocteau 2025
