Like This: 43 Odes

One of the meanings of "Adam" in Hebrew is like. implying "like God". A human being is a resemblance. Rumi opens the poetry of this. A man walking back into a house becomes the Resurrection. People dancing on the roof describe the constellations. The sight of a familiar head around the edge of a door is love returning to surprise the world. Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) is one of the world's great mystical poets. His life breaks exactly in two. During the first half ha was fairly conventional, and very learned, teacher in the colleges of Konya, Turkey. Then he met that Presence which is called Beloved, and also in this tradition, the Friend. In 1244 he encountered the powerful, wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz. The mysterious Conversations they had (sohbet) opened Rumi into a deep Friendship with existence, and non-Existence, that became the spontaneous river of his poetry. That body of work is now being brought over, from Persian, into the strong tradition of American free verse by Coleman Banks, Robert Bly, W. S. Merwin, and other pots in concert with various scholarly sources.