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This is a fake legend. I wrote it to try to portray the feeling that many adoptees have that they are not fully human because they aren't allowed to know their true origins.
Sometimes, we invent our origins.
The stanzas written in regular lettering are meant to represent someone telling a story, the italics indicate where the storyteller is spinning a tall tale.
Raven-Watcher
by Andrea Ross
Crouched on a shale slope, she peered
from between yucca spears
to watch them toboggan down snow patches
on their black-feathered asses; she muffled
her laugh when they snacked on snow-clods.
She learned raven-talk—
the sounds of water pouring into a canteen,
a hasp settling into place.
But what she loved most
was the way ravens loved: in mid-air.
Opposites attracted;
her sweetheart was a rock-climber.
He spent each free moment pressed
to canyon walls, while she loved the air’s caress.
Some swore she jumped.
She tumbled over the rim
like the pack-mules in the snowstorm that year.
Black feathers crowed across her face in love—free-fall, a mile.
They twirled, iridescent, and then swept upward.
Now, in a pile of raven’s down,
a human-raven baby softly grows
while mother blackness swoops
around the world, calling.
