The Wind

 Written in 1993. Revised 3/22/2026. (c)

Above the line of hard-hack and dune

three kites rise and fall like seabirds.

 

It is the wind, not the kites, that create music.

 

My mother mistook endurance for love.

My father takes any woman who’ll let him

and my mother thinks her anger will one day

draw him back. 

 

It doesn’t.

 

She kills herself --

Whiskey for dinner,

a twelve-hour six-day work week—

what would it take for him to notice.

 

Smoking, nail biting,

making high-risk choices,

 

We are all killing ourselves for him.

 

My friends and I, no wiser, married

illusions that faded

until we faced that love

does not transform us.

 

 In the distance, I hear the drone of a remote plane.

I cannot see it.  I pretend it does not exist.

It is easy to ignore, to move that sound

back behind the wreck of wind and wave.