Kite Flying in A Hurricane
- Surviving Breast Cancer
- Jan 30
- 4 min read
By William Laferriere
(Dedicated to Gloria and Veronica)
The kite’s string frays in my hand
the waxy slick hospital vinyl grabs at my slippered feet
My IV pole a tall crooked mast,
Metrical beeping in counterpoint
to the weather report no one turns off.
They say hurricane,
category something,
as if fear had concise little numbers
like stages, like tumor size, like OncoScores,
like odds printed on a chart that
I refuse to flip over.
Outside the window the sky is a bruising
Off gray, then turns suddenly furious—angry
clouds muscle in, heavy with words unsaid
and I remember the three fold brochure words:
“journey,” “fight,” “brave.”
But it doesn’t feel like a fight,
it feels like standing on the edge of a big city parking garage
with a kite made of my own skin.
I tape my hair to the kite tail
it’s coming out anyway,
tiny surrender flags on a thin plastic spiral
Nurse says don’t worry,
Doctor claims good margins,
Friends say you’ve got this,
and the wind answers with a dull roar
Emptying all those syllables in the stairwell.
Let it fly I tell myself.
Fly what?
This diagnosis, this stitched‑up chest,
this new geography of scars and statistics,
this half‑recalled body, with new contours,
It used to be simply mine
and is now a crime scene with clean white tape and port
I step into the parking lot,
gown flapping open like a warning sign,
That port in my chest a red‑eyed button.
The storm wall comes
I can taste metal in the air,
that before‑the‑impact flavor
I also taste at 3 a.m.
when the words “what if” won’t stop pacing.
This kite is ridiculous—
pink and loud and hopeful, and sad
its paper thin as skin over my sternum.
I shouldn’t run, they said,
I shouldn’t lift
but nobody said anything
about flying kites in impossible weather.
So I run.
Every chemo session, I run in place,
in my head, down a beach
That I visit once the drip starts.
The hurricane (aka the infusion),
then the scans, the scans and the scans,
the follow‑ups pile up
like dark clouds
And the yearly calendar pages rip
The line cuts into my palm—
this is how you know you’re still here:
pain on the edges.
The wind tries to yank my kite away,
hurling it into someone else’s tragedy,
tangling it in somebody else’s power line.
I imagine the storm has a certain deleterious face:
And looks like every doctor who has ever shrugged,
every statistic that didn’t ask my name,
every well‑meaning stranger
who says at least they caught it early
as if that word—early—
were a soft pillow instead of a lightning bolt
Gusts hit
Kite dives,
jerks,
spirals—
I think this is it,
this is recurrence,
this is the other shoe,
this is the scan that calls back at midnight.
But then, absurdly,
it climbs again
Someplace between panic and surrender
the string beats a crazy finger rhythm in my hands,
a give and take I didn’t know
I let out a little line when the wind screams.
Pull it in, gently, as it forgets its rage.
Breathe in with the storm
instead of against it. Breathe out…
I remember the word “remission”
and how it sounds like a pause button
Not a compromise,
Now the doctors won’t say cured
as if the tongue tied triggers fate.
The kite hangs up there, a stubborn punctuation mark
scribbled in black weather:
I dare not pause,
I say,
I am the whole sentence.
Rain starts, fat and cold,
like the first shock of seeing yourself
naked after surgery.
You grieve the loss,
yes,
but you also stare at that which remains:
a body still stubbornly orbiting the sun,
patched and stitched
and outrageously alive.
Lightning sketches the dark open sky
for a moment the kite is all that there is,
bright against the bruising
ridiculous & unwavering.
This is not victory, I think not
No not yet,
maybe never in the way movies promise,
but it is something:
I drop the string.
My arm is tired.
My chest aches where tissue used to be.
The wind keeps changing
soft, then savage,
like scan results,
like phone calls,
like the way people either lean in
too close
or back away
too far.
Still, I hold the line.
Not because I believe the storm owes me
not because I’m sure
I’ll walk out of this
with anniversaries to count,
but because in the middle of the howl
there is the small, precise fact
As the kite flies on, like a bird leaves the wire
And now
In the eye of it—
A brief, eerie calm
between one terror and the next—
I feel the wet string,
I see my breath in the crooked dark air,
I hear my heart as it knocks my ribs
like it’s asking permission to stay.
Okay, I tell it.
Okay.
I’ll stand here…alone
and fly this fragile, foolish thing
as long as the storm allows,
as long as I have fingers,
as long as there is any sky at all
And throw color against it
And if the hurricane wins—
if it snaps the line,
steals my kite,
scatters every lonely pink scrap
across a city that may never know my name—
remember this:
For a while,
in the worst of it,
I still chose to run into the wind
with my whole broken body,
refusing to let go
of a string
that was never designed
to be held in a hurricane.
Share your poetry:
SurvivingBreastCancer.org Resources & Support:
