Two Poems by Rafael Peñas Cruz

Unnerved at first by the buzzard's low flying approach towards me, diving so close that I could hear the displaced air as its wings cut through it, I understood the bird wished me away from the secret tree where it keeps its chicks. But perhaps it just wanted to befriend me. It keeps coming to me, hovering above, as I lie down to rest and take in the morning's scents and sounds, its colours. I pause for a while and try not to think about anything, just blanking out my mind, delving into the emptiness of everything, much as the buzzard delves into the great East Anglia sky. Perhaps it's just being friendly to me. Perhaps it can recognise a fellow worshipper of the balance between movement and stillness. What can it mean, the buzzard's buzz? I can't make out, self-confessed fisher of meanings that I am, what the buzzard says with his shrill voice, almost like a kitten's miaow. I thought it just wished to warn me about its nest in the woods nearby. But today there were two flying about in the open fields, far from those sacred woods of theirs. They circled about the tower of our local Norman church. One of them, whom I'll call my "friend", came as it saw me run across the wheat, and it stood dancing above me, piercing the blue dome with its song.

Summer is the time of the butterflies, they swarm around me as I run along the farm track that crosses between two country lanes. I alarm them into a blaze of shimmering sparks. They form a delightful arch along that rural corridor flanked by verges overgrown with wildflowers, the haunt of those myriad butterflies as well as insects of all kinds. It's a good year for them, which is good news for all of us, for insects are needed to keep the show of life running. Ah, but these butterflies! They are truly something else this summer. So spectacular, with their colourful wings fluttering about from flower to flower, poster creatures for an existence in a sheer presentness, the very essence of happiness and the extravagant abundance of summertime. They are all movement and transformation. They bring to my mind Master Zhuangzi's dream, the fluid quality of our reality, the hazy border between myself and the landscape in which I live and move. In the heavenly fields of fertile Cambridgeshire I run and dream that I am a butterfly, flitting and fluttering among the chicory flowers, unaware that I am dreaming. Like Master Zhuangzi, I cannot tell either whether I am the man who dreams he is a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it is a man. For a moment, the exact lapse of time that runs between me leaving one country lane and my reaching the other one, I am both, man and butterfly, moving according to the season's rhythm, feeling the interconnectedness of all things and their ever-changing nature of all I see. I dissolve and fade, my legs beat the ground in tune with the crazy graceful mantra of the insects' wings.