Rashid Maxwell
In England I keep bees, write verse, design buildings and landscapes for sacred use, watch birds all the time, make furniture, do lots of nothing with my grandchildren, exhibit prints and paintings, grow my vegetables, and bring to completion a book - a fiction of this inner journey that we all are undertaking - and really get off on beekeeping. But that is not who Rashid is.

Sand Dunes at Braunton

(" . . . one of the last really wild habitats left in the UK." UNESCO Biosphere)

the dunes welcome spring
with orchids and thistles
a windfall of waders and warblers
pale cobalt skies
and a thousand weekend tourists

spring is a show of life essence
my word for god or consciousness
of a fineness so fine
to the mind imperceptible

binoculars around my neck
grandsons bouncing footballs off
the curved sand-screes
we move in the
infinite field of fineness

from a high point we aim
for the brilliant blue barrier
over the slacks
over the ochre strip of mobile sands
white waves disperse into spray
its easy enough to glide

mind blunders forever between
pleasure and pain
a tilting world war gun emplacement
engulfed in panoramic heaven

now the boys tiff and bicker
creating each their separate minds
i stand on the wild shore yelling
the current - mind the current
let the current sweep you away


like a dog i am . . .

like a dog i am
standing in a windy landscape,
the one who owns me gone.

for years i traveled on the tops of busses,
overheard the women chatter,
the next poem would be the one;
accurate and beautiful.

i sip the light within the trees
swim the viscous spaces
in between the trees
bow down to the rook overhead.

i painted in words
the ribbon of nature
and the song that is not heard
and questioned why raindrops are evenly spaced.

sometimes i
almost understand
these things point to the mystery
and not to whatever i name it.

like a dog i am who waits
for the piercing to the heart whistle
and the steep descent through heather
to the car.



Brilliant Place

Maybe I don't have to leave
this brilliant resting place.

I've been loaded down with too much weight.
'Be somebody!' my dad said.
'Get ahead and stay ahead!'
I was carrying his father's hopes as well.

I got a head; a very, very heavy one.

Maybe I don't have to write a book, or stifle irritation, or fit into the empty slot
because,
this empty slot,
this brilliant resting place
from where all things arise,
is
who I am.


Like Antarctica

We sat on folding canvas chairs
round the fire whose quaking
flames engaged
our eyes and melted down the voices

the night was dark
a false sky
rose from the damp meadows engulfing
the dome tents
she said
it's like Antarctica

we rose and hugged I may be gone
some time he said and in the whispered
song of raindrops on his tent

vanished

Reflection

The old man's shoulders
droop
his frail frayed hairs
show
the friction of the years. "Is there anything we can
do?" I ask him.
"Is there some discipline or
practice
for attaining truth?"

"Truth?" he echoes. I think he
thinks,
how can anyone
attain
what they already
are?

"I know I know I know all that," I
say.
"Aren't we also human beings; not merely human
doings?"

In a dream last night, the waiter reported me to a passing policeman for not ordering a dessert. We were in a foreign country. I stormed out to the police station to clear up this ridiculous misunderstanding.
They made me wrap a tape measure six times round my fist. The reading off the tape in millimetres was the score of penalty points against me in some future prosecution. I could choose to pay a fixed fine then and there and have the slate wiped clean. The waiter and the police split the proceeds.
I think the dream was telling me existence is a-causal. Truth is not arrived at by amassing points for good behaviour.

"Doings?" he reiterates. I
guess
he's calling me a doer, poking fun at me because i
need
a practice just to
see
what's obvious right in front of me - that
this image is a mirage.

With that reflection he turns away
as I do from the mirror.

Poems from Rashid's book"Life is one Blessed Thing after Another", published by Tree Tongue Publishing, is available from bookshops, from Amazon.com and from treetongue.co.uk.

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