The kite has no passport

Forceful actions will be taken to put an end to this phenomenon [namely, the flying of kites]. A balloon is treated like a kite, and a kite is treated like a drone, with or without explosives.
(Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz, 24 August 2026).

I.

Cairo’s child with a spool,
barefoot upon the burning roof,
learning the difficult grammar of wind,
how not to pull when the sky said give,
how not to give when the sky said hold.

The kite was cheaper than a book,
two sticks, thin paper, paste and string,
but when it rose above the wires
and the water tanks and washing lines
the child owned, for once, a piece of air.

Below the city sweated.
Buses coughed along the avenue.
Crows quarrelled on the parapets.
Mothers called them home to eat.
They were negotiating with heaven.

Kites circling, diving, climbing,
strings crossing like arguments.
Sometimes one broke free
and everyone shouted as it sailed away,
then chased it through the lanes and markets,
past bicycles and men asleep beside their shops,
because a kite without a string
belonged to whoever could catch freedom first.

II

Gaza’s sky has another grammar:
drone, missile, helicopter, smoke;
where even a scrap of paper in the wind
can enter the vocabulary of war.

Israel is afraid of kites.

Imagine the power that confesses this:
a state with aircraft, tanks, satellites,
walls, watchtowers, guns and algorithms
looking upward at a child’s trembling paper
and seeing an enemy.

The kite has no passport.
It recognises no checkpoint.
The wall instructs it to stop
and the kite, being illiterate, continues.
The kite crosses above the rubble,
above the fenced and measured earth,
above the mathematics of permitted life,
carrying nothing that can be searched
except the ancient contraband of air.

The generals classify the clouds.
The colonels place the wind under arrest.
The captains interrogate the string.

A Palestinian child holds the spool.
as long as the hand does not waver,
as long as the paper becomes a wing,
as long as the suffocated look upward,
the sky cannot be occupied
entirely.