A Shadow with Wings

Depending on your shores; she is Death, fickle as her feathers in the wind;
she is the thief of light, the bearer of battle cries and shattered shields. 

With meticulous beak, she waits to break bones inside their frail containers.
She is the overseer of gain and destruction, soaring above burning fields and warring factions,
and as they die and bury their dead, she blinks and turns her wayward head to the sky.

Unflappable in her inaction, she is the stare of indifference perfected.

A shadow with wings, the black-eyed beast that heralds in a long resisted truth,
bringing to our  dear Edgar Allen the nevermore and darker news.

She is mischief in the flesh, an eternal Loki running on the wind or just above the water,
keeping always half a step ahead of Thor and smirking all the while.

She will let you watch her tumble there all day, halting, turning, again and again,
falling through the sky like some young Icarus, without the human trait of foolishness.

She captures life with all the sheen of her gaze, with the slick second of a silver flicker ripped
from the folds of a thrifty mind, out through the onyx sliver of her clever pupils and into my mine,

into my soul, that thing that jolts me there in my restless sleep where I lay dreaming of the Raven.