My friend Kathleen Kummer recently had her 95th birthday. We have had a weekly telephone call since the start of the first lockdown in March 2020. Kathleen’s poems from her collection Living below sea level have featured here before.

Flying a kite refers to the ‘90s, as the grandson is now in his thirties. He lives abroad, but regularly visits. A variation on the villanelle form, the poem successfully blends the personal and the universal.

Flying a kite

My grandson and I are flying his kite.
Though we stand on the earth’s green rim in spring,
there’ll be talk of wars on the news tonight.

We have climbed the steep meadow, have not taken fright
at the notice, Beware of the Bull. Larks sing
as my grandson and I are flying his kite.

We have coaxed it upwards, where wind and light
give life to what was a limp, gaudy thing.
Time enough for reports of the fighting tonight.

Its streamers rippling, the wind just right,
it rides the skies, a jocular king.
My grandson and I are flying his kite.

These skies are empty, but for the flight
of buzzards and invisible larks on the wing.
The skies they will show on the news tonight

will be apocalyptic, eerily bright
with the clever ways of destroying and killing
to which the whole world claims the right.
I am watching my grandson wind in his kite.