Mind Sand by Saleem Abdal-Khaaliq

In 1966 Saleem Abdal-Khaaliq, then known as John Davis, wrote his first poem, Obscure Thoughts, while attending Windsor Mountain School. Now some fifty years latter that poem is included in his first collection of poems entitled Mind Sand. For those alums who attended the 2017 Reunion we were treated to a reading of several of these poems (click here … about eight minutes into the video). Learn more about Saleem and this collection of poems, go to his website (click here) where you may purchase the book as well, or you may go directly to PayPal to purchase it (click here).

From the Forward to Mind Sand:

Being a teacher, a career educator, has not only been my professional identity, it has been the core of my personal identity. Continuing into my retirement in 2016, it remains the center of my being, the part of me that is deeply touched by the invitation to write a few words of introduction to Saleem’s book of poetry, “Mind Sand” – a splendid and unique reward among those my “kids” have given me over the fifty plus decades of that career. It touches me to know that Saleem began writing poetry at Windsor Mountain School where we met, a place of beauty in which you could grow toward fulfilling your dreams and potential. I was his English teacher just over a decade after my own years as a student there.

His poetry reflects a poet whose mind’s eye and ear grasp and reflect life’s ironies, its contradictory complexity, it’s offering of joy, pain and love, both personal and global. His imagination constructs the features of our landscapes, the bruises and joys of human interactions, the love, that after all carries us through this life. It projects, as well, an emotional history of the black experience of America, a history that is too little taught and understood across our contemporary society.

I invite you to read his poems open to your own sense and sensibility and to let reflection be triggered in you; you will then be moved and rewarded by your attention to his fine work, his play with word and structure, the product of his own senses, sensibility, creative imagination and capacity for reflection.

— Maurice G. Eldridge

Former Assistant Headmaster, Windsor Mountain School

Vice President, Retired, Swarthmore College