IN LOVING MEMORY

Published On: March 6th, 2026

Friends of Love— Our enormously warm-hearted friend of Love and Rumi has left the apparent earth plane where we live. Coleman Barks.

All the beautiful social media postings of Rumi poems from friends, like:
“Your mouth closes here
and immediately opens
with a shout of Joy there.”
-Rumi

“On the day I die, when I’m being

carried toward the grave don’t weep.

Don’t say ‘He’s gone! He’s gone!’

Death has nothing to do with going away..”

-Rumi

or the one I thought of:

It’s the old rule that drunks have to argue and get into fights.

The lover is just as bad: he falls into a hole.

But down in that hole he finds something shining,

worth more than any amount of money or power.

Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.

I took it as a sign to start singing,

falling up into the bowl of sky.

The bowl breaks. Everywhere is falling everywhere.

Nothing else to do.

Here’s the new rule: break the wineglass,

and fall toward the Glassblower’s breath.

-Rumi

I have danced many of these poems with the deep-hearted and often funny readings of Coleman Barks and his sonorous southern voice, in many iterations of The Rumi Concerts. The last two were at the Washington National Cathedral, with Coleman, myself, Glen Velez, Omar Faruk Tekbilek, and Dawn Avery, and at the Lensic Center for Perforing Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with Coleman, myself, Eugene Friesen, Glen Velez, and Zena Carlota.

I had the fun honor to work with Coleman for many decades. I called him ‘Buckwheat”, and he called me ‘Swanee’, short for Swan Lake or the Swanee River or any number of iterations.

While he was working on the well-known book, The Essential Rumi, he used to leave me what he called,” the Rumi of the Day, ” on my answering machine. We would discuss it over the phone as we were often cooking dinner in different places across the country. Sharing recipes or jokes. There are many stories. Perhaps I’ll write them in a while. We performed all over the place, with the best musicians, including of course David Darling, Glen Velez, Eugene Friesen, Reza Darakshani, Jai Uttal, Geoffrey Gordon, Yungchen Lhamo, Gordy Ryan, Dawn Avery, Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Shabda Owens, and others. We performed a bunch of times with Robert Bly. Many places.

I can say that everyone who met Coleman felt he was their own friend. And I’m pretty sure that was true. He had that way about him. Call it ‘southern’ or ‘heartfelt’. It was certainly in his voice. He was pretty funny and easy going in a way, but then he was extremely well read and knowledgeable in ways you would not always expect. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him. And if they didn’t, they would!

Besides his amazing readings with Lisa Starr, poet and partner, and a few of their appearances with the musical group, Coldplay, he began to slow down. So I began going to visit when I was en route to anywhere on the east coast. One time we all, Coleman, Lisa, and myself, with musicians, did a jewel of an evening in the University Chapel in Athens, Georgia, introduced by Alan Flurry, friend and writer par exellence, where Coleman taught for many years.

I have been a lucky Storydancer to work with Coleman Barks. And I have left out so many names of those who love him and knew him , and for this I apologize. Everyone has so many stories. Let’s write them all. The poet who brought Rumi in its American vernacular, who knew the meters of the best of English Literature and Poetry and applied the teachings to the meters we grew up with, and the wine of love that has been shared beyond belief.

May it continue, that the world of beings remember this Love now in these times, and forever more.

Below is what I wrote after talking with his wonderful family, just after he passed, as I was shockingly on my way to a performance in Delhi , India, in a large out-patient clinic (OPC) for dying cancer patients.

with love to all,
Zuleikha

Thoughts of Coleman from the Storydancer
~upon hearing the news of his passing
USA Feb.23 Night

He flew the coop!
He broke the glass,
He did his job
It will outlast his life
Amazing Grace,

In fact
he opened doors of heart
for all to see.

Not perfect in the sense
some would have liked, yet
all the renderings in fact
took flight,
and made their ways into the hearts
of common-sense man and woman,
not one apart.

Born the same day as Shakespeare,
given the poet’s task
to “set the verse of Rumi free
here in the West'” by the great bard, Robert Bly,
and so in renderings of time
and verse in meters we know
and feel,
he did just that.

And thirsty we were
for verse of heart that
opened us up to what
set us apart,
and Coleman with his southern swagger, accent beauty,
with help from his beloved Sri Lankan Bawa,
opened the door.

“it’s not religious
not exactly,
it’s not this and
it’s not that’,
yes some did say,
and yet the people found it so
and felt reclaimed in ways of heart
through pen with love of a poet’s art.

Once, in one performance-
Oregon it was,
when I was dancing in the verse
I looked up and saw among the box seats
sitting there, Rumi and Shams.
“He is one for this parched place” they seemed to say, and so they must have had their way- how could this verse sweep many lands, setting heart’s a-fire?
“He’s poet and a Ph.D and speaks with Southern, so you’ll see-
they’ll listen and they’ll laugh and cry,”

And so it was.

For some it seems
“the King has died,”
yet actually the opened skies have swept a Gabriel of verse
and taken him without a hearse
into the heart of Love he loved.

And so it is
somehow like this
and all will say how well they knew the part
he opened in their hearts
and so it is and Love
still lives.

Feb. 24, 2026
Delhi
India
written in the car, going to perform for outpatient clinic cancer patients
after hearing this news

Zuleikha
Storydancer in the Rumi Concert