Prologue: A Creation Story
       

There was a loneliness
spread so thin
that no one named it.
She collected her dead around her, missing
the dead she never knew.
The ravens remembered all
the dead, and they catapulted
down shafts of wind, ragged plummets
before swerving up and laughing on thermals.
They tried to tell her, chortling
their watery croaks from telephone poles.
She only answered with more questions.
Or she kept driving to another parking lot,
late again. In another place, the raven people
still traveled with wolves, diving
to play with pups and calling
out seal carcasses.
Where the ravens went, the wolves followed.
Where the wolves ran, the ravens flew.
Long ago, this was agreed upon, and nothing
could break it. Even now,
in the lands that have forgotten,
with the people who have forgotten,
in the cities that have forgotten,
the ravens perch in the branches
of the old trees who have seen it all.
The ravens wait for the wolves.
Finally, she traveled to an island in the north,
and she learned from a raven who came
each morning for scraps left on a flat rock.
Across the shoreline where the raven soared
and stitched the air, she looked up
as the wolves looked up,
and something old was born.

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Copyright © 2021 Anne Haven McDonnell All rights reserved
from Living with Wolves
Split Rock Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission