Tuesday, January 11, 2011

I have five friends


I have five friends

I have five friends that float along like kites in the sky:
chameleon kites:  sometimes a flat kite,
sometimes a delta—always a fighter kite
from day to day, and year to year, flourishing in flight.

Bright colors, tales swinging wildly,
buffeted by the winds of time and change--
often inter-tangling the strings of their lives
occasionally soaring apart.

All the trees want us--they are like children
reaching their twiggy fingers out
to hold on, to keep us from flying away.
It is tenacious work to sway above the fray.

Three of us have lost the hand that guides us
our lines tangled in the telephone wires
or driven by the wind into the trees.
We fly now unassisted, willy-nilly.

Three retain their handlers, making a team
of tethered flyers and sailors—
paired, partnered in the challenge
to fly banked against the blue skies.

From the earth below my kite is intact,
but from the clouds above, she is battered
From below one can’t see the holes in her silk,
but my kite is ready to cut the lines and drift.

                           * * *

A kite’s dream:

To drift among the clouds, breathing rarefied air,
caressed by the sun, floating with the stars;
if I am to be un-tethered, why must I still be constrained?
Let me be free.