While you were watching tv, I moved off
from an upstairs window, took one good curve
seawards, over Strangford Lough

Clacking in their pots, over the lobsters
With my bogwood and linseed wings,
children with kites pointing up as I mastered

that contraption. I knew it wasn’t the normal thing;
a girl in the air, keeping up the semaphore
churning the currents, arms like oars, aviating

that ungraceful machine closer and closer
to a world of my own. To set down and settle
where all the distance I earned, I worked for.