Blue-Eyed Raven

A raven, watching over a city. Always watching... And waiting...

Not all entries arrive as stories. Some surface in fragments.

In Market Hollow, where the chimneys lean

Like tired men confessing to the dusk,

There came a thing with eyes too keenly blue

For any honest bird of soot and musk.

It perched where sermons died upon the air,

And watched the town as if it knew them through.

They named it ill. They whispered it was sent

Ahead of grief, a courier dressed in night.

Old Hensley swore it blinked before his fall,

And Widow Marr recalled its wing at sight

Of fever’s bloom that took her youngest child.

Thus grew the tale. Thus tightened fear’s own knot.

It walked, not hopped, along the chapel rail,

As though it weighed the prayers left there to cool.

Its feathers drank the daylight into black,

Yet those strange eyes made every skeptic fool.

For blue they burned, like winter under ice,

Or truth seen once and never seen again.

The boys would throw their stones, then flee too soon.

The men would curse, but never raise a hand.

For something in the bird refused their scorn,

As though it served a law none here could stand.

It knew their hours. It marked their trembling clocks.

It stayed. It waited. Always, it returned.

Then came the night the river broke its sleep,

A swollen beast that chewed the bank to bone.

The Hollow gasped as waters climbed the street,

And every man felt suddenly alone.

The church bell drowned. The lanterns gave up light.

The dark grew thick enough to take a name.

And there it was, that omen all had damned,

Now slicing wind with purpose, sharp and sure.

It circled once, then drove toward the ridge,

Where higher ground might grant a chance to endure.

Again it cried, a sound both harsh and clean,

Till even doubt grew tired and followed on.

They climbed, they slipped, they cursed, they clutched their young,

While overhead, that blue gaze would not fade.

It kept them moving, carving through their fear,

A blade of will no flood could quite degrade.

And when at last they reached the rising earth,

The waters took the town and left them spared.

At dawn, it stood upon a broken post,

No longer shadow, no longer tale to dread.

The light made plain what fear had dressed in lies,

A simple bird where all their ghosts had fed.

Yet in those eyes, still bright with alien calm,

There lived a depth no common wing could claim.

The preacher wept, then laughed against the wind.

“Not curse,” he said, “but custody of grace.

”For what they fled had not been sent ahead,

But rather sent to lead them from that place.

A watcher, lent from some unspoken hand,

A pet, perhaps, that Providence had loosed.

So now they speak of it with tempered breath,

Not as a herald clothed in dread’s attire,

But as the quiet keeper of their path,

A coal-black shape with twin blue eyes of fire.

And when it comes, they bow their heads a while,

Not out of fear, but something close to trust.

— It was not what they feared. It was what remained. - T.C.J.