Black Kite

Black Kite

I look up, startled by that familiar keening whistle
of a kite, soaring over Po Wah Yuen,
watch the bird tilt and slide away over the village.

Like scents, so sounds always stay in the memory,
give sudden, vivid recall ' and so I find myself
on the Mary River twenty years, a world away,
cutting a kite from its death in discarded line
where four of its kind already putrefy. Once started,
I do not want to fail, though it grasps with needle claws
and slashes with its beak, exhausted, frantic.
Dripping blood, wondering vaguely about tetanus,
I get it free, and it struggles into the air, labouring heavily
over the lagoon to the sanctuary of rain-trees.

Now, on my balcony, I recall how few these gestures
of goodness in my life, how insignificant
in a catalogue of cruelties this small act of redemption.

Po Wah Yuen
May 2005