for my father

On a harvest festival many years Before today on a cool January morning When in the village your grew up in Farmhands would be strung out in chorus lines Slicing bent stalks of rice with black iron sickles

Father, you gave me, your first-born son A rupee to buy a kite. In the city I grew up in Distant from the smell of harvests, hard calloused Hands and sweaty sinuous bodies, young boys Like me reaped their harvests by cutting Each other’s kites with glass laced threads.

So I ran out and bought a kite I saw being made; on a square of translucent green paper bordered with a thread, a bamboo splinter was arched over this another was placed like an arrow in a bow. Then two elliptical holes were cut under the arch To give it eyes of a different color, a red eyed kite.

That day was the last day of the festival week, Perhaps that was why this kite took off flawlessly As we; you, mother, youngest uncle, sister, I And my childhood friend egged it on into That evening sky, a blue sea filled with shoals Of kites, swinging back and forth in aerial battles!

Our kite set sail into the west eyeing the sun, A galleon, even though we held and controlled it By the weakest thread and lacked the basic skill To avoid being severed by another swooping kite!

…

We soon had to lean into our toes, To recognize it in the horizon’s armada, It’s two beacon like lights dimming even As we watched. However you egged me on To loosen all my spools of thread and when Those ran out to splice on my friend’s.

You still were unsatisfied even though By then the kite was only as big as our palms. You commanded mother for fetch her sewing spool Thread half as thick as the one used to fly kites, And knotted it to the thread I held in my hand,

And said, “Come on now, send it out further”. I did, Father, as I always obeyed you then, Till the parabola of thread in the sky was a mile long And the kite took on a strange unstoppable weight As it ripped that thread off the spinning spool.

…

It happened then, almost in slow motion. The thread suddenly ended and took off into air, Rasping its thin finger over the edge of our roof, The tall coconut palms. None of us lunged forward To grab it, we became mere spectators to that vanishing. One of us had just forgotten to secure the last thread To the spindle of the spool. The kite was lost.

…

Father, in America I am that lost kite, Buffeted and loose, my two eyes always Fixed on a never setting sun, even in this

Silent dark.

2003:08:06 23:30 Atlanta