Pondering Ravens
“Pondering Ravens”
Glancing skyward
Where cloud mountains grow,
Dark specks appear on the white.
Bodiless shadows,
Black as space,
Circle high in the sky above.
Hundreds circling,
Giving shape to the
invisible thermal
On which they ride,
Circling higher, higher
And higher still,
Until finally they break.
Like children released from school,
They scatter about.
Chasing, spinning, diving,
Rolling and playing
In all directions away they fly.
Leaving the clouds to grow,
And me
To ponder.
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I don’t normally comment on my poems, but I want to tell you a little bit about this one. The scene that inspired this poem is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. It happened in the Owens Valley near the Tungsten Hills. There were hundreds of ravens circling on a heat thermal that was rising up from the valley. You could clearly see the thermal and the rotation of it because of all the birds. I’ve seen flocks of ravens do this before, but never in these numbers. The birds kept riding the thermal higher and higher until you could barely see the highest ones.
Then all at once, they broke from the thermal and flew away in all directions. As they were flying away the ravens began playing. They were chasing each other, diving, doing flips and spinning, it was like school had been let out and summer vacation had started. Within 10 minutes of the birds breaking from the thermal, there wasn’t a raven to be seen anywhere. They were all gone.
The raven tends to get a bad rap from people. If you study them though, you find that they are a very interesting and unique bird. This isn’t the only time that I’ve been fascinated by their behavior. There have been many times that I’ve been left pondering ravens.
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