Thought and Memory
Tonight as I was putting my son to bed, I looked out the window in his room into the backyard. Sam asked me what I was looking at and then, before I could respond, said “Does the backyard remind you of your dream?”

Actually, I was looking to see how long the grass was and if I needed to mow this weekend, and I told him so. “What dream?” I asked.

“The one about the birds,” he replied.

Well, it took me a minute to catch up to him (as it always does, at seven years old he is already is far smarter than I am) and then I went cold.

Here is a brief description of a dream I had, one I told him about the next day. This is from my journal; an entry dated August 30th:

The birds are scattered on the lawn like hats after a windstorm — black and fluttering, the corvus-something cawing to each other under the baleful gaze of something that sits atop the fencepost and silences them with a snap of his head. He is heavier than the others, squat and fierce, with a shorter, blunter beak. Heavy, metallic feathers plate his skull and body like armor, rattling as he moves, hopping from post to post but when I run inside to grab my camera, I come back to find the yard empty without even a stray feather to show proof of the force that had gathered there. I look up into the pale sky, straining to hear the fading cry as names flutter through my mind: Horus, Huginn and Muninn, Morrigan, Morgan…

Morrigan, Morrigan.

War is coming.

As I said, it fairly chilled me to reread that last line this evening. I know when I wrote it I had Palestine on my mind, and I assumed the juxtaposition of meaning that Horus (middle-eastern god), Morrigan (Irish goddess of war), Huginn and Muninn (raven attendants named Thought and Memory that perch on the shoulders of Odin, a Norse god of war) was a fluke of free-association steeped in mythologies.

But I assumed — and I suppose I still assume — that the symbolism imbedded in my dream was nothing more than the by-product of listening to reports from Israel every day on NPR.

Nevertheless, keep your eye on the crows,