Skip to main content

Kites

By Stephanie Burt
Complete in ourselves,
we look like scraps of paper anyway:
left alone, we could tell

our mothers and one another our owners’
flimsiest secrets and play together all day

until we became intertwined, which is why
you try
to keep us permanently apart.

One of us is a gossamer pirate ship,
a frigate whose rigging the industrial

sunset highlights, sail by oblong sail.
Another resembles a Greek letter — gamma,
or lambda; others still

a ligature, a propeller, a fat lip.
Our will is not exactly the wind’s will.
Underlined by sand,

whose modes of coagulation and cohabitation
none of the human pedestrians understand,

we take off on our almost arbitrarily
lengthy singletons of string

towards the unattainable, scarily
lofty realm of hawk and albatross
and stay, backlit by cirrocumulus.

It seems to be up to you
to keep us
up in the air, and to make sure our paths never cross.

Poet Bio

Image of the poet and critic Stephanie Burt.

Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor. Burt has taught at Macalester College and is now Professor of English at Harvard University. She lives in the suburbs of Boston with her spouse, Jessie Bennett, and their two children.

See More By This Poet

More Poems About The Mind

A Wyandot Cradle Song

By Bertrand N. O. Walker

Hush thee and sleep, little one, 
     The feathers on thy board sway to and fro; 
The shadows reach far downward in the water 
     The great old owl is waking, day will go. 

Rest thee and fear not, little one, 
     Flitting fireflies come to light you on your way 
To the fair land of dreams, while in the grasses 
     The happy cricket chirps his merry lay. 

Tsa-du-meh watches always o’er her little one, 
     The great owl cannot harm you, slumber on 
’Till the pale light comes shooting from the eastward, 
     And the twitter of the birds says night has gone.

  • Living
  • The Mind
Browse Poems About The Mind