a message from Coleman Barks

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A message from Coleman Barks:

Trying to explain my silence, and my inability, maybe, to say poems in public for an indeterminate while. Please forgive this group emailing. Last Sunday morning (Feb. 27, 2011) I had a stroke. I was talking on the truck Onstar phone to my love Lisa Starr. I began to slur words, and then became completely inarticulate, then fairly coherent, then not, then back to some clarity. Driving down Milledge, I turned left on Springdale and drove myself to the St. Mary's Emergency room (a Gold Plus Stroke Center). They immediately put me on TPA. So I have been tremendously lucky, actually. In three months, my neurologist doctor (Van Morris!) says (by early June), we will see 80% of what improvement (in my half-smile and my speech) is possible. I plan to work with speech therapists, hypnotists, and whoever else, to get better. Larry Dossey and Fran Quinn say prayer is also a big help.Grace and practice. So there is my challenge for the short run. I am mostly sleeping as much as I can (grace) and listening to recordings of my old voice in my kitchen and talking along (practice). I am not answering the phone or the door, or emails (only a few). Please forgive me these reclusive measures. Think of me as an old dormant bear, healing. Lisa is here. Benjamin and Cole and Briny are close by always. Plenty of helpers. I should also tell you too that my cognition is working. I can read and write just fine, and no motor functions are impaired. Arms and legs active and strong. It is really just a slightly droopy right eyelid and my having only half a smile. Speech is, to me, the big problem. It radically comes and goes with its effectiveness. Hopefully, the brain will re-route itself back to normal.Love to all, Coleman

(Please forward this to anyone who might be interested.)

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moses and the shepherd

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Moses heard a shepherd on the road praying. 

"God, where are you? I want to help you, to fix your shoes 

and comb your hair. I want to wash your clothes 

and pick the lice off. I want to bring you milk 

and kiss your little hands and feet when it's time

for you to go to bed. I want to sweep your room

and keep it neat. God, my sheep and goats are yours. 

All I can say remembering you is aaayyyyy

and aaahhhhhhhhhhhh."

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Moses could stand it no longer. 

"Who are you talking to?"

"The one who made us and made

the earth and made the sky."

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"Don't talk about shoes 

and socks with God! And what's this with your little

hands? Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like

you're chatting with your uncles. Only something 

that grows needs milk. Only someone with feet 

needs shoes. Not God!" 

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The shepherd repented

and tore his clothes and wandered out into 

the desert. A sudden revelation came then to Moses:

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You have separated me from one of my own. 

Did you come as a prophet to unite or to sever?

I have given each being a separate and unique way

of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.

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What seems wrong to you is right for him. 

What is poison to one is honey to someone else. 

Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,

these mean nothing to me. I am apart from all that. 

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Ways of worshiping are not to be ranked as better 

or worse. Hindus do Hindu things. The Dravidian

Muslims in India do what they do. It's all praise, 

and it's all right. I am not glorified in acts

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of worship. It's the worshipers! I don't hear 

the words they say. I look inside at the humility.

That broken-open lowliness is the reality. Forget

phraseology! I want burning, burning. Be friends

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with your burning. Those who pay attention to ways

of behaving and speaking are one sort. Lovers who

burn are another. Don't impose a property tax

on a burned-out village. Don't scold the lover. 

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The "wrong" way he talks is better than a hundred

"right" ways of others. 

Inside the Kaaba

it doesn't matter which way you point 

your prayer rug!

The ocean diver doesn't need snowshoes!

The love-religion has no code or doctrine. 

Only God. 

So the ruby has nothing engraved on it!

It doesn't need markings. 

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God began speaking

deeper mysteries to Moses, vision and words, 

which cannot be recorded here. Moses left himself

and came back. He went to eternity and came 

back here. Many times this happened. 

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It's foolish of me 

to try and say this. If I did say it, 

it would uproot human intelligence. 

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Moses ran after the shepherd, following the bewildered 

footprints, 

in one place moving like a castle

across a chessboard. In another, sideways, 

like a bishop. 

Now surging like a wave cresting,

now sliding down like a fish, 

with always his feet

making geomancy symbols in the sand, 

recording his

wandering state. 

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Moses finally caught up with him. 

"I was wrong. God has revealed to me that there are

no rules for worship. Say whatever and however

your loving tells you to. 

Your sweetest blasphemy

is the truest devotion. Through you a whole world

is freed. 

Loosen your tongue and don't worry 

what comes out. It's all the light of the spirit."

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The shepherd replied, "Moses, Moses, 

I've gone beyond even that.

You applied the whip, 

and my horse shied and jumped out of itself.

The divine nature and my human nature came together. 

Bless your scolding hand.

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I can't say what has happened.

What I'm saying now is not my real condition.

It can't be said."

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The shepherd grew quiet.

When you look in a mirror, you see yourself, 

not the state of the mirror. 

The flute player

gives breath into a flute, and who makes the music?

The flute player!

Whenever you speak praise

or thanksgiving to God, it's always like

this dear shepherd's simplicity.

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~ Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks

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music is in the piano only when it is played

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We are not one with this world. We are not

the complexity our body is, nor the summer air

idling in the big maple without purpose.

We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves

as it passes through. We are not the wood

any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage

between the two. We are certainly not the lake

nor the fish in it, but the something that is

pleased by them. We are the stillness when

a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of

insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident

when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part

of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists

only in the singing, and is not the singer.

God does not live among the church bells

but is briefly resident there. We are occasional

like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed

with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold

on to the enterprise under way in our chest.

Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what

walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat

and giant sky, the sea stretching away.

He continues past the nunnery to the old villa

where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides

touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,

which is the difference between silence and windlessness.

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~ Jack Gilbert

with thanks to saturn rising

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I melted in it and came home

I exhausted myself, looking.

No one ever finds this by trying.

I melted in it and came home,

where every jar is full,

but no one drinks.

~ Lalla

from Naked Songs

translations by Coleman Barks

green-stripped melons

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They lie

under stars in a field.

They lie under rain in a field.

Under sun.

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Some people

are like this as well—

like a painting

hidden beneath another painting.

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An unexpected weight

the sign of their ripeness.

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~ Jane Hirshfield

from Alaska Quarterly

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overspilling

Of all that God has shown me

I can speak just the smallest word,

Not more than a honey bee

Takes on his foot

From an overspilling jar.

~ Mechtild of Magdeburg

from Women in Praise of the Sacred

with you

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O my Lord,

the stars glitter

and the eyes of men are closed.

Kings have locked their doors

and each lover is alone with his love.

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Here, I am alone with you.

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~ Rabi'a

from Women in Praise of the Sacred

art by Leonardo da Vinci

I was passionate

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I was passionate,

filled with longing,

I searched

far and wide.

But the day

that the Truthful One

found me,

I was at home.

~ Lalla

translated by Jane Hirshfield

All will come again into its strength

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All will come again into its strength:

the fields undivided, the waters undammed,

the trees towering and the walls built low.

And in the valleys, people as strong

and varied as the land.

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And no churches where God

is imprisoned and lamented

like a trapped and wounded animal.

The houses welcoming all who knock

and a sense of boundless offering

in all relations, and in you and me.

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No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,

no belittling of death,

but only longing for what belongs to us

and serving earth, least we remain unused.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

 The Book of Pilgrimage, II,25

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the kings of the world are old and feeble

The kings of the world are old and feeble.

They bring forth no heirs.

Their sons are dying before they are men,

and their pale daughters

abandon themselves to the brokers of violence.

Their crowns are exchanged for money

and melted down into machines,

and there is no health in it.

Does the ore feel trapped

in coins and gears?  In the petty life

imposed upon it

does it feel homesick for earth?

If metal could escape

from coffers and factories,

and the torn-open mountains

close around it again,

we would be whole.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Pilgrimage, II,24

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no miracles, please

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All who seek you

test you.

And those who find you 

bind you to image and gesture.

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I would rather sense you

as the earth senses you.

In my ripening 

ripens

what you are.

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I need from you no tricks

to prove you exist.

Time, I know,

is other than you.

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No miracles, please.

just let your laws

become clearer

from generation to generation.

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~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Pilgrimage, II,15

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violence

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I believe that 

those who have used violence 

have betrayed all true revolution, 

they have changed nothing, 

they have simply enforced with greater brutality

 the anti-spiritual and anti-human drives 

that are destructive of truth and love in man.

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~ Thomas Merton

from A Life in Letters

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cold light

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Diamond-like clarity travels cold

the manifold currents, cracks self-concern,

reveals self-suffering, crumbles

the crooked walls of the darkness

of presumed otherness

This far-reaching indifference of wisdom

vision unfolds an always lurking compassion

only when fused in communal warmth,

only by passage in the movement of breath

Breath, the reach of hearts,

the rhythm of living and dying,

the reach solitary voices

meeting in the night.

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~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

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the sanity I had been taught

When the desire for the Friend became real,

all existence fell behind.

The Beloved wasn't interested in my reasoning,

I threw it away and became silent.

The sanity I had been taught became a bore,

it had to be ushered off.

Insane, silent and in bliss,

I spend my days with my head

at the feet of My Beloved. 

~ Abu-Said Abil-Kheir

Shaikh Abu-Said Abil-Kheir was one of the earlier Sufi poets. He lived more than two centuries before Jelaluddin Rumi yet, like Rumi, much of his mysticism follows a similar path of annihilation in divine Love.

Abu-Said's poetry ranges from the ecstatic and celestial, to struggles with abandonment. His poetry has an immediacy and even a sort of devoutly wry petulance that can draw comparisons with the great Bengali poet, Ramprasad.

Abu Said referred to himself as “Nobody, Son of Nobody,” to convey the mystic's sense of having completely merged or disappeared into the Divine, leaving no trace of the ego behind.

He lived in Mayhana in what is modern day Turkmenistan, just north of Iran and Afghanistan in Central Asia.

with thanks to poetry chaikhana

conceit

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It is conceit that kills us 

and makes us cowards instead of gods. 

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Under the great Command: Know thy self, and that thou art mortal! 

we have become fatally self-conscious, fatally self-important, fatally entangled in the cocoon coils of our conceit. 

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Now we have to admit we can't know ourselves, we can only know about ourselves. 

And I am not interested to know about myself any more, 

I only entangle myself in the knowing. 

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Now let me be myself, 

now let me be myself, and flicker forth, 

now let me be myself, in the being, one of the gods. 

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~ D.H. Lawrence

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