Send the reapers… send the ravens!
Halloween classic horror poem Ravens In A Churchyard At Dusk (live version)
It’s a piece that’s been haunting me for a few years. It seems to have a will of its own and it refuses to do what’s asked of it. Or at least it did…
I was inspired to write Ravens In A Churchyard At Dusk when I saw some ravens in a churchyard at dusk. Sounds obvious – but it was the vibe of the moment that was the inspiration. It was an overcast late autumn evening, very Halloweenesque, and the gloom and silence generated a heavy sense of foreboding.
There were four crows pecking at something on the ground as I approached. Three of them flapped off out of reach, waiting to return to what was left of a vole or something. But the fourth stayed brazenly where it was and glared at me. You know sometimes you wouldn’t be surprised if an animal just spoke to you in clear, expressive English? That crow was quite obviously ready to tell me: “If I had my way, I’d be eating you right now.”
I stepped past it and it kept a calculating eye on me as I moved on, while the other crows rejoined it. The phrase “the scavengers grow brave” was already in my mind, and the rest followed (most of it on a train a few weeks later after I’d been through the same churchyard).
Various versions of
Ravens have plied their trade in various formats, most notably the
comedic video I made with Kelly Phillips, featuring Hal Sinden as the narrator. It didn’t do particularly well and I’m still not sure why. Perhaps the humour aspect didn’t land?
This live version – from the Light Up Festival in Milton Keynes, England, in November 2022 – is the first time I performed it. Jacob Holm-Lupo’s wonderful music (as always) really spurred me on to express, nay overdo, the horror aspect, which I think works well. There’s always the argument that no one can interpret a piece like the person who wrote it.
It probably also helped that, just a day or two before, I’d realised that there were some 20-second-plus musical interludes, and there wasn’t time to ask Jacob to reconfigure his music, so I’d better quickly write a few more lines. That’s where the “send the reapers - send the ravens!” stuff came from. Being worried about messing up the unfamiliar bits probably put me on the right kind of edge.
And then there’s that stupidly difficult line, one I’d never have written if I’d known I’d need to perform it: “With cackled caws a clack of claws carve up the carrion soul!” Although I’ll modestly say it’s an excellent line, and that once I’d come up with that on the train, the rest of the piece followed before I’d got to the pub.
You can’t do horror ravens without being linked to Edgar Allan Poe; knowing that, I decided to embrace it, along with all those lovely Hammer House of Horror movies and shameless melodrama.
I think it's behaving now. It’s meant to fun –– fun that makes you think, “Hmmmm” for just a moment.
