Kites
A wish on a string: the whole art of holding on while letting go.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about kites: flight, tethers and letting go, with real poets, craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, plus exercises and prompts by Writory.
What this theme is
A kite is the only flight we manage while keeping our feet on the ground, and every kite poem is secretly about that compromise. The string is the poem's true subject: the line that lets the kite rise and refuses to let it leave, tension made visible from hand to sky. Parents feel it, lovers feel it, anyone who has raised or held or taught anything feels it, which is why the kite carries so much more than paper and sticks.
Kites also make the invisible visible. Wind has no body until the kite gives it one, tugging, stalling, climbing, and poets borrow that trick constantly: the kite as instrument for reading what cannot be seen, whether weather or grief or a child's growing independence. And because kites eventually dive, snag in trees or snap free, the theme comes with its endings built in.
Why poets return to it
Poets pick up kites when they need to write about attachment without saying the word. The physics does the arguing: slack string and the kite falls, too tight and it cannot climb. That single mechanical truth maps onto parenting, love and teaching so cleanly that the poem barely needs to gesture at the parallel. Judges reading for theme and emotion, as Writory's five-criteria scoring does each month, tend to reward exactly this kind of image that thinks for itself.
Where it comes from
Seamus Heaney returned to kites across his whole career. In an early poem he flies a kite with his young sons and hands them the string, telling them to feel the strain, the long-tailed pull of grief that belongs to being human. In one of his last poems, written for his granddaughter, the string breaks and the kite rises free, and the poem lets it go with something close to blessing. Between those two kites lies a lifetime's thinking about what we pass on and what we release.
The kite is also one of poetry's most travelled objects. In Punjab and North India the spring festival of Basant fills the sky with fighting kites, glass-coated strings crossing and cutting, and that contest of severed lines has fed songs and poems for centuries. In China and Japan, kite imagery reaches back over a thousand years, carrying wishes, prayers and names into the wind.
The elements that carry it
- The string and the hand that holds it, tension, burn, slack and strain, carry the theme's emotional argument.
- Weather is a character: the useless still day, the perfect steady breeze, the gust that ends everything.
- The kite's materials, paper, spars, a tail of rags, knots retied by small fingers, keep the poem homemade and human.
- Trees, wires and rooftops, the places kites die, are the theme's graveyards and worth a poem on their own.
- The upward gaze itself: necks craned, eyes watering against the sun, a crowd looking at the same point in the sky.
Techniques that work
- Write the string, not the kite. Track the whole poem through what the hand feels, and let the sky stay out of reach.
- Use the handover as your turning point: the moment the string passes from one hand to another is the theme's natural volta.
- Let the snapped string end the poem, but decide first whether it is loss or release, and make one image carry your verdict.
- Ground the flight in exact craft details, the bridle knot, the spar that cracked and was splinted with tape, so the symbol keeps a body.
- Try short tugging lines and enjambment on the ascent, then a single long line when the kite steadies, letting form imitate flight.
Mistakes to avoid
- Announcing that the kite is freedom. Kites are tethered; the honest theme is the negotiation between freedom and hold, which is richer anyway.
- Skipping the failures. Kites that will not launch, that spin and crash, that eat an afternoon, are truer and funnier than instant flight.
- Leaving the flyer out. A kite alone in the sky belongs to no one; the poem needs the hand, the burn, the person squinting upward.
- The inspirational-poster ending where the soaring kite teaches us to dream. End on the string, the tree, the walk home, anything real.
An exercise
Write twelve lines about flying a kite in which you may name the kite only once. Spend the rest of the poem on the string, the hands, the wind and the watcher, and see how visible the kite remains.
A challenge
Write two endings for the same kite poem: one where the string snaps and the loss is grief, one where it snaps and the loss is relief. Change nothing except the final three lines, and study what the images had to do differently.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about teaching someone to fly a kite, in which the real lesson being handed over with the string is never named.
Before you submit
- The string appears and carries feeling; the poem is not all sky.
- At least one exact material detail keeps the kite homemade and real.
- Freedom, dreams and soaring are shown through physics and gesture, not declared.
- The wind is specific: strength, direction, mood.
- The final image resolves the tension of holding and letting go without a moral.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.