Flying a kite is a strange kind of ownership. You hold the string, but the thing you hold is far away, tugging against you, belonging more to the wind than to your hand. Mary Carolyn Davies's "My Kite" captures that odd mixture of control and release in eight short lines, and in the process says something quietly touching about freedom and return.
The poem moves in two small steps. In the first stanza the kite rises, "like a bird flying," until it "sits with the birds / At the edge of the sky." In the second, the birds go home to "their waiting tree," and the kite does the same, coming back "to me." On the surface this is just a child's description of an afternoon outdoors. Underneath, it is a poem about the pull between going away and coming back, and about the comfort of knowing that something you let go of will return.
The comparison with birds does most of the work. The kite is introduced through a simile, but by the end of the first stanza the simile has almost dissolved: the kite doesn't merely resemble a bird, it "sits with the birds," as if it had been accepted into the flock. The verb is lovely and slightly surprising. Kites don't sit; they strain and flutter. Yet "sits" suggests ease, a settled calm high above the ground, and it lets us feel the speaker's pride that a paper-and-string toy can keep such company. Then there is "the edge of the sky," a phrase that makes the sky sound like a place with a border, a far shore the kite has reached. The child's imagination turns a windy field into a journey to the end of the world.
The second stanza introduces the poem's emotional turn with one small word: "waiting." The birds return to their "waiting tree," and this adjective quietly gives the tree a personality, as though it were patient and attentive, like a person at a door. When the kite "comes back / To me," the child takes the tree's place. The speaker becomes the waiting one, the fixed point that the wandering thing returns to. Notice, too, that the poem never mentions the string. Nothing is said about pulling the kite in. In the child's version, the kite simply returns, as freely as the birds do. That omission is the poem's gentlest trick: control is disguised as trust.
The form supports this simplicity. The lines are short, mostly two or three stressed syllables each, which gives the poem a light, bobbing rhythm, like something drifting on a breeze. The rhyme scheme is sparing and neat: "high" and "sky" chime in the first stanza, "tree" and "me" in the second. Those pairs are worth comparing, because they mark the poem's two directions. The first rhyme looks upward, to height and distance; the second looks homeward, to the tree and to the speaker. The poem's very last word is "me," placed alone on a short final line, so that the whole flight resolves into a single syllable of arrival. After all that open sky, the poem ends by closing in on the self.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much feeling it gets from so little. It never says "I was happy" or "I love my kite." Instead, the emotion sits in the arrangement: the rising, the pause among the birds, the quiet homecoming. It also works on two levels at once. Read literally, it is a child delighting in a toy. Read more broadly, it echoes something older and more universal, the hope that whatever we send out into the world, whether a kite, a friend, or ourselves, will come back safely. Few poems this brief manage to be both a game and a small act of faith.