Dark Omens

There was a loud and raucous cawing filling the air as I stepped out my front door. I walked the length of the porch to investigate, but I knew what I would find. In the two tall, dead trees bordering our yard, a flock of crows had taken up squatters’ rights in the tallest of the skeletal limbs and were squawking at each other. Groups of crows are sometimes known as a murder. Was this a warning?

It’s hard not to conjure up scenes from a Hitchcock movie when I see this many of that kind of bird together. The kind that attacked, the kind that pecked eyes with their long, black, lethal beaks.

On the drive into town I stopped at a red light and there, perched on the sign next to the road, was a single crow staring at me, sizing me up. Was this a dark omen?

Like the raven who came tap, tap, tapping on Poe’s window and entered to watch a mad man rant, could these dark wraiths harbor anything but doom?

Ravens or crows, I’m sure any competent ornithologist would gladly tell me how they differ, but I like to think of them as simply blackbirds. Then it brings to mind the gentle lyrics of a Beatle song:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night,
Take these broken wings and learn to fly,
All your life,
You were only waiting for this moment to arrive.

Don’t we all, in the deep, dark part of our soul, shelter a little broken wing? And don’t we all have some kind of “moment” we are awaiting to arrive and thrill to the notion that it actually might happen?

These dark omens dressed in mourning feathers and perched high over my head in dead branches, could be just a bunch of crows with nothing better to do – or they could be harbingers for the start of new possibilities.

My choice!

Denise Kalin Tackett
Sept. 14, 2010