A mystical musing on love lost, and contagions present and future.

By Dan Hicks

The new year’s first full moon was our January Wolf Moon whose haunting visage, as it ascended into a clouded Cranbrookian sky, was a credit to its lupine legacy, for on this otherworldly winter night, a patient pack of gothic wolves leisurely lay beneath the lunar- illuminated tree displayed, resting afore making their ravening foray play.

I was thus then expecting our raven too, which upon the tree alighted, tap tap tapping in an eagerness to impart, borne of its plutonian heart – frightfully insightful lore, sourced from that distant darkened shore; though resolved was I to be more wary, in my corvine discourse scary, than was poor Poetic Edgar Allan – Lord save his sautéed soul. My premiere question was necessarily morbid, straightaway I asked the cunning corvid, news of our COVID pandemic’s enduring? “evermore” came its ominous ornitho-conjuring.

Desperate now for favourable tidings of a future worth abiding, I then implored the winged wonder – might I revive loves long asunder, Devonian damsels so adored, but none whom angels named “Lenore.”

“Nevermore” replied the raven, citing the quintessential corvine mantra, the cheeriest prognostication I had heard in a long interminable while, and the resolute raven was rather unnerved – by my sardonic smile; this otherwise all-knowing creature, so attuned to the grim reaper unrelenting, was conceptually challenged in comprehending our modern societal plethora of irksome “exes,” oft ordained to forever vex us (& therein lieth my Poetic nexus).

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