A Kite is a Victim

Richard Bawden

A Kite is a Victim

A kite is a victim you are sure of.
You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you master,
strong enough to call you fool;
because it lives
like a desperate trained falcon
in the high sweet air,
and you can always haul it down
to tame it in your drawer.

A kite is a fish you have already caught
in a pool where no fish come,
so you play him carefully and long,
and hope he won’t give up,
or the wind die down.

A kite is the last poem you’ve written,
so you give it to the wind,
but you don’t let it go
until someone finds you
something else to do.

A kite is a contract of glory
that must be made with the sun,
so make friends with the field
the river and the wind,
then you pray the whole cold night before,
under the travelling cordless moon,
to make you worthy and lyric and pure. 

      

Leonard Cohen



This poem came to mind while my family was out flying kites this week. There was just enough wind, and I got the kite high enough to relax a little, and thought to myself, "Am I guiding the kite, or is the kite leading me?" Like with walking a dog, the roles seem to alternate. Sometimes we lead, and sometimes we are led. It's interesting. Who is the master, and who is the fool? 

I haven't got to the bottom of this poem yet. It's a fun one. Just recently I've tried switching out the word "kite" with the word "life", and it works, it makes sense. We live in that paradoxical place - we're free, but we're not free. We live as if we can make choices, and we do, but we are limited, very limited, and true  freedom is an illusion. That line, "A kite is a fish you have already caught/In a pool where no fish come." I'll be happily puzzling over for years.

 

Daisies

Unknown

Daisies

It is possible, I suppose, that sometime

we will learn everything

there is to learn: what the world is, for example,

and what it means. I think this as I am crossing

from one field to another, in summer, and the

mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either

knows enough already or knows enough to be

perfectly content not knowing. Song being born

of quest he knows this: he must turn silent

were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead




oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly

unanswered. At my feet the white-petaled daisies display

the small suns of their center-piece - their, if you don't

mind my saying so - their hearts. Of course

I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and

narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know.

But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,

to see what is plain; what the sun

lights up willingly; for example - I think this

as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch -

the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the

daisies for the field.

Mary Oliver



More Mary Oliver. More of her poems to punctuate my days. She recalls me to nature, and especially the "personal" natural world. "Science"might quibble, might say she anthropomorphizes, which is to accuse her of being childish and sentimental. I disagree. Seeing an animal or object as having personal meaning to us, having individuality (in the sense of uniqueness and purpose), and of their existence impacting us, as in "saying" or communicating a message to us, all of this seems obvious and true to me. (It's very strange to think that scientists, of all people, whose work involves studying natural things and phenomena closely, and whose lifework is so enjoined with nature that it could be said that it becomes part of their person; and whose attempts to describe and explain what they discover comes more close to pure poetry than any other profession aside from poets themselves, that they have so often been the ones telling us "Don't make this about you! Don't ascribe human characteristics to other forms of life!" is incredible. Impossible. "Take what is given..see what is plain."! 

 

 I walk through a field of daisies, and wonder what the mockingbird is singing about. It is singing about something that matters, both to it and to me. I look at a daisy and say it has a heart, meaning that it has a centre, an intention, and a Source - as I do - and recognize the thread between us, the pattern and symmetry we both are part of. 

 

Fact is only part of the truth. Proof is in life, in how we live in spite of what we say we think. It's personal. The bird mocks us, "as one who knows enough already or knows enough to be perfectly content not knowing". No matter how much we learn, birdsongs and flower hearts will always be speaking to us of more. Learning "all there is to learn" is not necessary, not the point. The connection, the pattern, the Source, all these, these are better than knowing. As cummings said in "little birds" ,

"may my heart always be open to little
 birds who are the secret of living
whatever they sing is better than to know". 

Theorum

Jeffrey T. Larson

Theorum

Prose can be hard as you like, let it make you restless.

But poetry is a vibration heard when life is dumb:

shadows move on the hills: pictured wind and clouds,

the going of smoke or life: bright, dim, bright.

a quiet-flowing current, deep clouded forests,

slow-mouldering houses, lanes radiating warmth,

a doorsill worn to a crisp, shadow-silence,

a child's timid step into a room's gloom,

a letter from a far country thrust under the door,

so large, so white it fills all the house

or a day so steely and bright you can hear

how the sun nails fast the blue void door.

Eeva-Liisa Manner

Manner is a Finnish poet, and I wonder what is lost in translation. What comes through is that connection between poetry and silence. It seems contradictory that poetry, expressed in words, could be about wordlessness. Maybe a better way to say it would be that poetry expresses something beyond words, like a quiet awareness, or an inner knowing. Manner uses the word "heard", is she implying that poetry is something already there? It makes sense. I mean, it doesn't come from nothing. Perhaps the poet's role is not one of creation so much as hearing/seeing/feeling and then directing that "quiet-flowing current". If that's true, then there are two ways (at least) of experiencing poetry, one in the initial hearing/seeing/feeling, and the other in the translation of that experience into words. Yes, translation. Exactly. I've thought this a while, that poets are translators. But also that all of us experience poems. Those moments when we stop, when we notice the clouds moving, the shadows stretching, the world turning - we are embraced within a breathing, pulsing, moving poem. "A vibration heard when life is dumb." We move within a poem, and are part of it, agents within our "form". There are words for it, yes, but the poem itself is bigger than the words. Life itself is the poem.

Grass

Sunchaser Fine Art and Photography

Grass

Grass basks greedily in the sun

As light penetrates each vein

Saturating the stem in the sheath.

Grass contains every gradation of green:

Loves both fiery sun and drenching rain;

Tugs the watcher downwards, underneath

Grass to crushing earth and stone.

Still the watcher comes to watch again,

To see the grass caress the gravel path.

Alan Bold

There are miracles underfoot. Even this carpet that we walk over, this living, breathing sprawl of green. A few of the recent poems have had similar movement –  up from under – “Listen” by Iain Crichton Smith, and “here’s to opening and upward” by e.e.cummings. This poem by contrast takes us down. Underneath! The place where everything begins. In the dark, in the imagination, in the heart. All the longing, the straining, the desire for light and the infusing of hope ferment here, they awaken and stir us with a yearning for something more. The poem reminds us that life begins in darkness, the seed buried  - how amazing that this should be where hope originates. And it made me think as well - these are not "new" plants, not at all, these are resurrection plants, each blade of grass a descendant of the grass of Eden. And we also, are resurrection people, sons and daughters of Eden, carrying the hope of the first garden with us, however dark life may seem.