Kite Flying

 

Kite Flying in South Cambridgeshire

Kite flying was a rare thing when I was a child.
Not just the crimson plastic diamond
draped listlessly over its hollowed tubular frame,
yellow flagged tail drooping
as the guide string dragged
over grassy, barely remembered hills
in search of a wild wind to set it soaring,
which it rarely found,
but as much the solitary soaring hawk

crooking its ruddy-brown wings over broad welsh hills,
its tuning-fork tail resonating to whistling air
too far for me to hear it fading west.                    

Then nature worked a rare miracle, man-assisted,
reddening the sky over the grey A40
with strong wing beats and forked tales,
white flashes of under-wing,
whistling calls,
the dour trunk road becoming a guiding line
red kites flew up into renewed existence.

Time flew too, dragging me in its wake.
Decades now into my adulthood,
beside the high chalk line edging brazenly
into the unfaltering flat of Cambridgeshire,
the clear mew of the sky-wise buzzard,
dancing proudly through the blue,                                      

is echoed by a piping call
from a hooked black beak with yellow cere.
These are broad skies, holding many feather-fingered wings
and now rouged tail forks and taut yellow legs tipped
with obsidian black as the red kite
soars into a sky wide world.

  

"Kite Flying in South Cambridgeshire" was first published in In Other Words. 

                                                                       ©J.S.Watts