“Flying Kites,” stereogram, by Kim Scarborough, 2007. Licensed under Creative Commons.
Finding dusk
and crepuscule wanting,
Shakespeare came up with gloaming.
French muttering of the blue hour,
people on the eastern plains of India
of godhuli bela, or cowdust time,
South Africans feeling the same
need I must have to stretch it longer
to lakutshon’ilanga,
because in my dream I ached
with the absence of the right word,
yearning instead for a camera
to catch the quality these children
ran through in my childhood field,
chasing a kite on no string
which couldn’t possibly fly,
canvas in the glowing drizzle,
but there it went, barely at first,
then higher.
There was that tragic sense of never-to-return,
some of it in the kite’s improbable lurch and soar,
some in those little legs scattering in the last,
grainy, gorgeous, never-to-be-seen-quite-like-that-again
light.
Lakutshon’ilanga originally appeared in The Roanoke Review.
