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.

 

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.

First Steps, Brancaster

Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

First Steps, Brancaster

This is the day to leave the dark behind you
Take the adventure, step beyond the hearth,
Shake off at last the shackles that confined you,
And find the courage for the forward path.
You yearned for freedom through the long night watches,
The day has come and you are free to choose,
Now is your time and season.
Companioned still by your familiar crutches,
And leaning on the props you hope to lose,
You step outside and widen your horizon.

After the dimly burning wick of winter
That seemed to dull and darken everything
The April sun shines clear beyond your shelter
And clean as sight itself. The reed-birds sing,
As heaven reaches down to touch the earth
And circle her, revealing everywhere
A lovely, longed-for blue.
Breathe deep and be renewed by every breath,
Kinned to the keen east wind and cleansing air,
As though the blue itself were blowing through you.

You keep the coastal path where edge meets edge,
The sea and salt marsh touching in North Norfolk,
Reed cutters cuttings, patterned in the sedge,
Open and ease the way that you will walk,
Unbroken reeds still wave their feathered fronds
Through which you glimpse the long line of the sea
And hear its healing voice.
Tentative steps begin to break your bonds,
You push on through the pain that sets you free,
Towards the day when broken bones rejoice

Malcolm Guite



“This is the day.”
“The day has come.”
“Now is your time.” 

Walking into freedom, into healing, into a new season – with nature encouraging and welcoming – who wouldn’t want to respond to that invitation?! Who wouldn’t want to step outside?

Probably the best incentive to get some fresh air I’ve ever come across.

Finite and Infinite

Gustave Courbet - "The Wave"

Finite and Infinite

The wind sounds only in opposing straits,

The sea, beside the shore; man's spirit rends

Its quiet only up against the ends

Of wants and oppositions, loves and hates,

Where, worked and worn by passionate debates,

And losing by the loss it apprehends,

The flesh rocks round and every breath it sends

Is ravelled to a sigh. All tortured states

Suppose a straitened place. Jehovah Lord,

Make room for rest, around me! out of sight

Now float me of the vexing land abhorred,

Till in deep calms of space my soul may right

Her nature, shoot large sail on lengthening cord,

And rush exultant on the Infinite.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin

“All tortured states/ suppose a straitened place.”  What a beautifully accurate image that is! The poem is so perfectly crafted, showing how the wind and water are only worked up when they have boundaries to stop them, when they are held in, pent up, limited. The way Elizabeth Browning uses the metaphor of crashing waves for her state of mind moves me. I can relate. I've lived in a "straitened place" for several years now. A place where I am continually cast up against my own limitations. There has been little room for rest or peace. I too, have been crying out to God for relief, for room, for "deep calms of space {where} my soul may right her nature". "Vexing land abhorred" ?!! She's got that right. How good it is to know others have been in this place, and felt this way, and continued on calling out to God and putting up sails.