Once upon a midnight dreary, while one Corvus corax flew near me, I saw the common raven’s empathic core.
A bird adorned for night, a cryptic healer made for flight, misunderstood due to forgotten lore.
Distinctly, I remember one Dec. 10th grade, when I first read Poe’s prose.
His poems are dense and dark, his mind overwhelmed by loss, mistaken for the raven he opposed.
Loss with unfortunate correlation, Edgar Allen missed causation! You mustn’t fear the cousins of the crow.
While you sit there grieving, with a heart nearly weeping, a raven may appear peeking.
While Poe laments a lost Lenore, he misses what the raven is for, a misinterpretation now forevermore.
Now dropping the poem for prose, I can freely speak without the splendid tyranny of meter and rhyme. Ravens are truly majestic birds with a nearly unparalleled level of intelligence. The behaviors that ravens, and more broadly, the members of the genus Corvus, display are truly remarkable and have put into question many previous paradigms of animal cognition.
This intelligence and capability have materialized in fascinating ways. Try as you might, they won’t forget. Their friends won’t forget. Their grandchildren will not forget. The raven’s capacity for learning and passing down information is well documented. Is this why they seek the broken?
And upon many nights so dreary, when shadows stalk fast and eerie, the raven is found across many seas.
The way the raven makes a living, while a comfort for the living, lies in the heart of its ecology.
Ruling the night, the raven takes flight, wouldn’t you love to perceive?
A comfort for you is information to be used; a raven never forgets a face.
Passed down from kin to kin, it takes your loss and adds a pin; they’ll never repeat a mistake.
So when shattered and broken, listening to pleas softly spoken, its presence sweetly displayed.
We are creatures of habit. We had to be to survive. We are trained to match correlations with outcomes. But living just off of correlation will paralyze you. It is how the worst of our anxieties and insecurities materialize.
It’s a tragedy that when you are down and out and a raven is spotted, it is taken as a bad omen. I assure you, they did not cause your suffering. They are here for you. It’s the purest mutualism. Blending synaptics with symbiotics. The pain you so undeservingly feel is something they want to learn from. They, too, fear loss. The only way to grow this strength is through others. Empathy needs a connection to be felt in its rawest form. They take on this burden to give themselves the strength to go through tragedies with the knowledge that healing is always possible.
Deep into that darkness peering, while some stand fearing, others are fascinated by the dark flight.
The messenger of the Allfather, perched upon that pallid Pallas, ravens are friends of the gods.
Bearing the names of legends, Lewis Flacco and Jackson, etched in the pigskin poems of Baltimore.
Ravens legends forevermore, and even if feared before, now you understand their innocent core.
So welcome the raven into your life, allow it to take its soft dark flight, and now fear nevermore.
