A child watches as her grandfather
holds the string in his right
hand, wrapped around his fingers. He gathers
the slack each time the kite
jumps or falls in the swirls
of a drenching summer wind.
I remember when I was a little girl,
and my dad would send
me out with the green and yellow tissue-paper kite
that we had made, to the field behind our
house. The waves of barley rippled as far as we
could run. Dad would stay and watch me
until the sun had dwindled into twilight.
He watched me run, and fall, and fly for hours.