Her mother’s eyes
Susie Paskins discovers poetry that engages with the world
‘Faith makes one a pioneer, a trailblazer; it turns the traffic lights from amber to green. While we rely on the power of the self we are much more likely to dither or retire. Trusting in the Power Beyond means having a sense that all will be well. Our mission is to be loving and stay alive, to proceed in faith and encounter every situation with freshly awakened eyes’.
These words were written not by a Quaker urging us to think outside our comfort zone – though they could have been – but by a Western Buddhist, Dharmavidya David Brazier. He is one of the founders of the Amida Trust, which was formed in 1998 to allow those who had taken Buddhist vows to affirm their commitment to full time Buddhist training in a socially engaged context. Now the Quaker Universalist Group has published a volume of David’s poetry under the title Her Mother’s Eyes.
His poems are perceptive and compassionate and deal with a wide diversity of themes. These are very much the poems of someone engaged with the world and with human emotions of love and despair. The powerful title poem deals with the thoughts of a young girl raped in the Bosnian conflict and the opening section of the collection contains other poems about the horrors of war and its effects.
Poems about love make up the second section, love in all its forms: love attained, love lost, love refused. In a beautiful short lyric entitled ‘Fragility’ David expresses the sadness of lost love:
White chrysanthemums
offset the dark sky above
yet in his fond dream
it had been her spread white frock
beneath a sky of azure.
He picked one sweet bloom
and held its fragility
whispering her name
as if to conjure the dead
for she knows him no more.
There are more light-hearted poems, too. David likes to play with language and use formal rhyme in different ways. As a result the poems are easy to read and very immediate. Many readers will resonate with the following thoughts from ‘Not Selected’:
If life was a choir I’d not have been selected
but in cacophony I have my place
at least until I come up face to face
with those who think we should have been inspected
and checked for all our previous undetected
errors, omissions, torts, wasted space
and other forms of error and disgrace
that narrow minds delight to have dissected…
Or, from ‘Lineage’
The line that someone else took
you cannot follow,
for not even with perfect choreography
you are not he
and the geography of his moments
has already eroded
into a now past age.
The line that someone else took
lies like a tempting word
in a golden book,
a book that never lies;
yet you can never make that word
your own…
I enjoyed David’s poems for their diversity, humour, humanity and engagement with the world.
Her Mother’s Eyes and Other Poems, David Brazier, QUG Publications, 2011, £7.99. Available from: Tony Philpott, QUG Publications, 111 Greenhill Road, Winchester, Hampshire, SO22 5DX
