The Last Question to Bawa | Coleman Barks

.... The last question I asked Bawa before his death on December 8, 1986 , was about his eyes.

"Will what I see in your eyes ever come up behind mine and look out through me?"

He used that most profound pun in English to answer, "When I (eye) become a we."

My strongest memory of the rainy afternoon we buried Bawa is of the amazing light in everybody's eyes. Enlightened beings who live their souls so deeply surely continue to live in the eyes of those who love them.

- Coleman Barks in the introduction of his book of Rumi's poetry, The Glance: Songs of Soul-Meeting.

+ Coleman and Rumi | “These poems need to be released from their cages.” That is what American poet Robert Bly told University of Georgia professor and poet Coleman Barks in 1976, when he handed him translations of the Sufi poet and mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi.

And so began a friendship, carried on through a deep and continuing conversation between these two poets: one a contemporary American, the other a Persian, born in the country now known as Afghanistan in the 13th Century. Professor Barks freed these ancient poems from their confines with intuitive, clarifying understanding, and with the unspoken intimacy that only true friends encounter. (credit)

+ About Bawa | Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen was a revered Sufi saint from the island of Sri Lanka who shared his knowledge and experience with people of every race and religion and from all parts of the world. He belonged to the Qadri order of sufism. He first came to the United States in 1971 and established The Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship of North America in Philadelphia. It was Bawa who as guide gifted vision, inspired and instructed Coleman Barks to bring and revive Rumi for the western audience. And credit to Coleman, Rumi is today's best selling poet in America and perhaps the most read poet in west.

also read: Coleman Barks and Vision of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
. In Salon translator Coleman Barks discusses the bestselling poet