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.

 

Sea Pebbles

Unknown

Sea Pebbles

My love, how time makes hardness shine.

They come in every color, pure or mixed

gray-green of basalt, blood-soaked jasper, quartz,

granite and feldspar, even bits of glass,

smoothed by the patient jeweller of the tides.

Volcano-born, earthquake-quarried,

shaven by glaciers, wind-carved, heat-cracked,

stratified, speckled, bright in the wet surf—

no two alike, all torn from the dry land

tossed up in millions on this empty shore.

How small death seems among the rocks. It drifts

light as a splintered bone the tide uncovers.

It glints among the shattered oyster shells,

gutted by gulls, bleached by salt and sun—

the broken crockery of living things.

Cormorants glide across the quiet bay.

A falcon watches from the ridge, indifferent

to the burdens I have carried here.

No point in walking farther, so I sit,

hollow as driftwood, dead as any stone.

Dana Gioia

"How small death seems among the rocks. It drifts/light as a splintered bone the tide uncovers." A beautiful but chilling line. 

 

The description of the stones, too, "blood-soaked jasper", "volcano-born, earthquake-quarried, shaven by glaciers, wind-carved..torn..tossed up..." is one of violence. There on the beach before him, the speaker sees a panoply of violence and death. 

 

And yet, there is something else, too. "The patient jeweller of the tides", who works the broken glass bits into sea- glowing gems, the forgotten, broken discards made mysteriously new/old, once common buttons or bits now uncommon, rare. 

 

The strangeness of shells, which, though nothing but remains, skeletons of once living molluscs, become something like pieces of art; sculpted minute monuments to the lives they once housed. 

 

This is how Time and the ocean work upon life and death. Curiously, with rhythmic alchemy, so that what was once merely a multitudinous brokenness, becomes a  treasure, a sign of hope. 

 

The speaker, though, sits among all this like a shell of himself, indifferent, unresponsive. 

 Is there hope that Time and the patient jeweller will do their work on him as well? 

 

 

 

 If stones can be made to shine, can broken humans be made new?