I heard a Raven's Calling

CAW!!

Today I heard a raven’s calling, the mournful sweet call of the morning sun and pollen wind.  It broke the silence and shifted in the stillness of the air.  I heard it from all directions beckoning me to come near.  I drew from my bed and ventured down the hall, the creak of the floorboards beneath my toes as the weight shifted them crackled like sticks in a fire.  There was something new in the air and something old in the mist, the contradiction was palpable as I stepped from the porch and felt the early morning dew as the feet stepped lightly on the grass.  Cold yet warm, discomfort yet…?

CAW!!

Again it called, from up in a tree like a dove soaked in oil it sat, its observation of my progress was that of god watching Adam’s first steps. The damp air wet my clothes and they clung to my body.  The new air yet something old in the mist, again a contradiction man cannot describe.  I felt him in the mist, a cloak about him, a clock dangled from his wrist.  It was he.  Him who comes.  The losing race between man and death, one that cannot be outrun.

CAW!!

Again it calls, again I heed.  I walk without direction in the enveloping mist.  I walk with solemn determination to he who beckons me. His cloak pushes the mist from him, it swirls in anger that it cannot wet him.  He stands, a hand to be outstretched, the skin a silver pale.  Old and bony like a fetid corpse.  His finger reaching toward me.  A millipede wraps, twines itself in a scurry around his fingers.  His nails long and yellow cracked cuticles and blackened dirt.

CAW!!

He reaches now, my hand to him I offer, so close yet so far I cannot touch him.  He beckons and I cry.  I want to go, but I want to stay. I yearn to run but like a babe to his mother’s breast I am drawn.  Life is as a waterfall flowing over the cliff constant from a distance but rushing upon approach.  The exhilaration like a drug through the veins but the terror is also gripping, like Schrodinger’s cat I am in two states at once, Alive and dead, blissful and terrified.

CAW!!

How many times does the Raven call before I die? I wonder.  He caws for me a silken cloak of elegant black wrapped in hemp cords and silver fastenings.  A face of white and sunken eyes.  He look far yet intense.  He comes for me.  I wish to run but I move toward him, a dance of two beings.  The push and pull of gravitational forces pulling us inevitably closer.  A collision is imminent and we will become one.  Is this the path of all souls?  From one to many, from many to one?

CAW!!

It has come, time and space collide, my senses dull and the world becomes heavy my mouth thick, my muscles as stone.  A prison of none’s design, a body as a statue forever watching a rotating world.  A passenger to eternity, a stowaway hidden from the living.  I go to his embrace.  I go to my eternity.