Raven, trickster, appears
behind the oracular candy bar,
dark sweet thing,
brings fire, light, creation itself
a gift
to the myth-hungry two-legged
who come up out of mud,
crying in darkness

Stolen from the Sky Chief, this light,
by playing the innocent;
a pine needle in the right girl
becomes a baby boy:
the Chief's grandson.
His glowing toy: our sun,
and his message to me,
"Be not confined
by what you seem to be." ©2008 Carol Gunby

Raven is the mythological figure that chose me in class through a numbered candy bar drawing, and he'll be showing up here a lot, I think, as I try to figure out what he might mean for me. I'm still learning about him; there are a lot of raven stories in Native American traditions of the Pacific Northwest, where he roughly parallels the Southwest's Coyote as a trickster figure. He has a different energy about him, though, something more brooding and dark (think Edgar Allen Poe vs. Wile E. Coyote for general associations). Maybe he'll have something interesting to say to my inner goth.

I also can't help but think of the Raven character in a play I saw a few years back called Bright River, which was a deeply imaginative redressing of Dante's Inferno in modern clothes (consider Purgatory as a Greyhound Bus depot). The raven, like all the characters in the play, has a chance to tell his story, and his plaintiveness in recounting his childhood in a prison gave me a new perspective on these dark birds. While the play's no longer being performed live as far as I know, I would really recommend getting the CD at the link above; the storytelling is superb, and so is the music that accompanies the tale.