Another poem by the Dutch poet Willem Jan Otten

THE KITE

I have been let up on a dune-top deep slanting under me,

square to the wind and to a string-jerk of a child

aloft in the above-dune power. This was Friday.

Now I wait swaying for his message. I am the secret

by origin, the one who raised aloft at any rate was I,

I paid out my own navel to him, he caught the wind

and climbed then out of me, and the small island at his foot,

it also caught the wind and ending hanging from a slender line,

a knot, and I stood windward in the selfsame wind,

from me he then unwound till finally paid out. I stand,

not to be hauled back in, at the end of his allotted single

line. His is at liberty to let me loose, everything in him

will understand me by seeing who I am when he casts me

far from him, he will not know that one real tug

will rip his line, he wants to be the real rip himself,

he is not to realise standing free in me, me

standing arms outstretched at his end becoming a beginning.