A Crow in the Morning

A Crow in The Morning

He knew the crows in the small wood. He knew their little houses, their exits and entrances, and he sensed when one of them had died.

He left out bits of bread for them in bad weather.

Sitting under a tree, he pondered them. The crows were black, black as night, black as coal, black as evil, if evil was dark. Darkness equated with evil, the sinister side of things. He drew on a cigarette, and a zephyr of grey exhaled from his widening mouth. Black crows, black, black, black and then, there existed the black arts – witches and their covens and all their ilks. The calls and caws of crows, their cries, were not pretty sounds, lacking in sweet melody. Crows were not unlike ravens, and ravens were part of that family. 

And her hair had been raven, he mused.

Far off, he heard the sound of a chainsaw, cutting a tree, perhaps. A dog barked somewhere. It took him away from his reveries, from the straw apartments in the far branches. He looked at the clay around him. His eyes followed an ant as it tried to traverse a fallen leaf in front of him. For a moment, he felt like that ant, in so far as that he too was a tiny creature, moving through life across the unknown tundra of experiences. He heard raindrops tap dancing in the canopy above. A mere handful of drops managed to penetrate the dense cover of the foliage, dampening the soil slightly. His thoughts moved methodically. The smell of grass, tree and soil surrounded him where he sat. What arrogance was it that he thought himself more important than that struggling ant? Who could say who or what was important in a world where the margins were the womb and the tomb? Did anybody or anything matter? If the world was random, accidental, without meaning, was it not inevitable that chaos and rot would ultimately prevail? He thought about this as his eyes examined the swaying greenery. A random raindrop fell into his eye, his left eye. It disturbed him. It made his mind go to where he did not want to go. Yet, the crows, in their straw houses, lived undisturbed in their high apartments, singing their raucous tunes there.

Her voice was crow-like too, he mused.

The crows flew off, cawing. 

When he thought of her, of all those things that had come to pass, of the hospital curtain falling on her life, of the yew-treed graveyard, of that sadness, the ending in the rain, he knew that the universe was not random or meaningless. He knew that, despite all the trials of being, he had loved her. He knew that he had borne a cross across a waste land of a marriage that never was. It was mainly a piece of paper, encrypted in the long and slow crucifixion of his being. 

She could not see it. She would not see it. She dare not see it.  What the eye could see and the ear could hear, was sufficient for her in her nest of comfort. 

The heart was blind, willfully unseeing.

Yet, he knew that the ordinary and mundane could not last, and he knew he had to carry the invisible heart- work alone. He saw things and he knew things that no one knew. In a sense, the crows in their high turrets were the same. 

He made no reply to the ones who accused him of madness, of being a fool.  He knew that he knew, and that was that. The eyes and ears of the heart were far superior to optics and eardrums. 

He threw some crumbs into the wood. There were crows in the graveyard at that hour. They nestled in the yew trees and cawed in dirges as the rain fell on the coffin, her coffin. 

The whole affair had been a long Calvary, an uphill trudge against himself, carrying the burden of the wood, of hard unfeeling.  He had not been believed. He had not been seen in his invisible agony.

He knew that this was an old story, a tale as old as the world, and the truth was never comfortable. The cawing of crows, those lonely-voiced trumpeters lorded it over the tombs, the plinths and the messages of grief, which would wither come what may. 

He stood up as the rustling of the rain in the high branches withered to a mist. A shaft of sunlight penetrated the greenery, making a kaleidoscope of light as the leaves moved in the whispering breeze. 

She was dead now, gone, gone to another world, that haven within, that parallel universe of the soul’s final harbour. She had returned from whence she had come. Perhaps! Perhaps not! She might know now the things that had escaped her and be informed of the truth that she had refused. 

And she might know that the pain of the fool had ransomed her soul, and the crows cawed in the morning