Saturday’s Prayer

In the animation above, from the NFB’s 1977 “Poets on Film No. 1,” Canadian actor Paul Hecht reads Cohen’s poem “A Kite is a Victim,” from his 1961 collection The Spice-Box of Earth. “A Kite is a Victim” is about process, it’s a formal meditation focused on the image of the kite, which flutters through each of the four stanzas in metaphors of taming, capturing and nurturing language, then letting it go, hoping to be made “worthy and lyric and pure.”