Black kite, circling

Some days, poems come like gifts at dawn, fully-formed, demanding I write them, not allowing a single edit. And then there are days when they just sit on a fence, vague, cold, mocking, refusing to let me approach. I love the easy poems. The reluctant ones, I love even more.

This poem came on a nothing-day. When no word could stand another. As if the morning had swallowed every verb. As if the tongue rattled in a mouth full of consonants.

But then, there was a lone bird in the cloudless sky. And then there was a single word. And then there was a pause. And then there was this poem.

Black kites are everywhere in this city. But to hear a loud whistling call and look up at the large brown bird floating in the February blue, to forget for a moment it too is a scavenger, it too is just circling the concrete jungle looking for an opportunity — to see only the breadth of wing, the majesty of grace and the slow, measured arc that life should be — that is a different kind of poetry.

Black kite, circling

In the darkness, I knock on 
a poem’s door and I am 
let into an emptiness.
For days I have been afraid of this.
Of an empty poem,
its words gone.
Or never arrived.

I remember thinking every day would seed its own poem.
There was enough.
For a flower, for a tree, for a field. 
But was that just fertile pain? 
Memory rewriting itself in a bearable language?

Now my world crumbles each morning. 
With its poems. 
I want to write about the black kite I see through
the window as I lie on the weight bench:
the difference between muscle mass and hollow bone,
the proximity to cloud,
cloud itself, like a haloed divinity. 
An antithesis. Aloft, despite its weight. 
I want to write all this, between moments, movements, between 
buildings, raised arms, between thoughts, between 
empty verses of a poem.

Do you have the words? 
Do they stream in like light —
or are they a consequence of light? 
Do they travel in lines, worker ants, bearing more
than their weight?
Do they fall like rain — pooling in every depression, 
letting you reflect: all the colours, all the contours,
the shape of the outside,
leaving behind an amorphous shadow for the sun,
an approximation of the inside?

Do they come with wings,
rise in the column between concrete towers?
Do they bend the silence
and fold the distance,
catch a ride on a waiting thermal?

Do you think it is your poem I see,
dressed as a kite,
the sun in its claws
yesterday in its beak
signing the sky —
heavy with words.
Aloft. Circling.
The cloud shifting.
The light shifting.
The world shifting.
Giving way.

I extend my hand, a dumbbell clutched tightly in my fist.

#Poetry