Eight short lines, one missing smile. Everything in "raven" circles an absence: "another day goes by / without me ever seeing your smile." The speaker addresses a "you" who is never named and is described only through the body: smile, eyes, hair. It is as if longing has narrowed attention to whatever can be looked at. The central idea is that devotion shows up in small details, in noticing every change and hoping to be let back in.
The first four lines are about looking. "Your eyes are ocean like" is a plain comparison, even a little unfinished, with "ocean" and "like" left as separate words. The next line gives it weight: "I could stare into them all day and night." You stare into an ocean rather than glance at it, so the image suggests depth and the pleasure of losing yourself. It also sets up a quiet contrast in time. The "day" in line one is an empty day that merely "goes by," while the "day and night" of line four is the endless time the speaker would happily spend gazing. The same word names the time endured and the time wished for.
Then the poem turns. "Your hair used to be hazel long / now they're cut, color raven." The tense slides into the past, and the sentence sounds like unedited speech: "hair" becomes "they're," and "hazel long" is inverted, which puts "long" at the line's end where it can half-rhyme with "dawn." Hazel is usually a word for eyes, so the poem has quietly crossed its colours. The eyes get the sea, and the hair borrows a name from eyes. "Raven" is a black with a sheen, and the bird has long been tied to omens and mourning, though the poem never says whether the change is sad. Judging by the text, the cut and the dark colour mark a gap between the person remembered and the person now in front of the speaker. There is also a puzzle. The speaker clearly knows the new hair, yet claims never to see the smile. One reading is that the person is seen but not happy, or not open.
The sound of the poem carries much of its feeling. The first quatrain isn't rhymed in the strict sense, but "by," "smile," "like" and "night" all share a long *i*, a held vowel that sounds like a sigh. Line lengths there alternate, by my count, between roughly six and ten syllables (6, 9, 6, 10), a rhythm like uneven breathing. The second quatrain settles (8, 7, 8, 9) and rhymes in a rough ABAB pattern, with "long" and "dawn" as a near-rhyme. The only perfect rhyme is saved for the last words: "raven" and "haven." They differ by a single consonant, so the dark word and the safe word nearly touch. "Haven" originally means a harbour, which carries the ocean of line three to its destination. The eyes the speaker could stare into all night become the water the two of them hope to find shelter from, or in.
The pronouns trace a similar journey. The poem begins with "me" and "your," moves to a lone "I," and ends with "we" and "each other's." The final question is modest. The speaker doesn't say "be my haven" but asks to "go watch the stars till dawn," then to "help finding each other's haven," which is mutual and offers help as well as asking for it. Night, the raven's colour, is no longer something to endure. It becomes a time to share, with dawn promised at its end. The poem's palette follows this, from ocean blue to hazel brown to raven black to pinpricks of starlight.
The byline, "selfproclaimedwriter," reads like a username, and nothing in the text tells us more about who wrote this or when. The poem doesn't need that. Its interest lies in how much it makes from plain materials: three physical details, one rhyme held back until the end, and a speaker who moves from watching someone's absence to proposing a way to close it.