A poem by Judith Beveridge

This is a tender, soulful and perversely uplifting poem. I read it first in the trashy-sounding-but-really-good book 80 Great Poems From Chaucer to Now and was delighted by the simplicity of character it conveyed, the playful, colourfully-present humanity it captured and, well, just its sheer elegance and vividness. A little boy not thinking of dislocation or injustice or of how to improve or correct his life, just enjoying a stolen moment each day with his kite: "equivalent now only to himself, a last spoke within the denominations of light". Wow.

Bahadour

The sun stamps shadows against the wall
and he's left one wheel of his bicycle
spinning. It is dusk, there are a few minutes

before he will be pedalling his wares
through the streets again. But now, nothing
is more important than this kite working

its way into the wobbly winter sky.
For the time he can live at the summit
of his head without a ticket, he is following

the kite through pastures of snow where
his father calls into the mountains for him,
where his mother weeps his farewell into

the carriages of a five-day train. You can
see so many boys out on the rooftops this
time of day, surrendering diamonds to the

thin blue air, putting their arms up, neither
in answer nor apprehension, but because
the day tenders them these coupons of release.

He does not think about the failing light,
nor of how his legs must mint so many steel
suns from a bicycle's wheels each day,

nor of how his life must drop like a token
through its appropriate slot; not even
of erecting whatever angles would break

the deal that transacted away his childhood -
not even of taking some fairness back
to Nepal, but only of how he can find

purchase in whatever minutes of dusk are left
to raise a diamond, to claim some share of
hope, some acre of sky within a hard-fisted

budget; and of how happy he is, yielding;
his arms up, equivalent now only to himself,
a last spoke within the denominations of light.