An American poet known for his interpretations of Rumi, Coleman Barks is from Chattanooga, Tennessee, but has lived in Athens, Georgia, for decades. Now somewhat reclusive and in his late 80s, he has intimated these six new poems written exclusively for The Bitter Southerner may be his last.
Poems by Coleman Barks | Photo by Benjamin Rouse
August 6, 2025
When I die, I want a piece of apricot pie served to everyone.
I didn’t get near enough while I was alive,
apricot pie.
I have never seen an Apricot orchard.
They are mostly in the San Joaquin Valley I hear. Where can you buy a piece of Apricot pie?
Anton’s Signal Garden still in the 40s and 50s.
Or you could, north of Chattanooga towards
Signal Mountain
Buckminster Fuller says about the past.
Keep it. Times Square for example.
Put a dome over it. Set up tables and chairs,
so people can feel what was there, not just read about it.
Ramakrishna said if you gave people a choice
between going to heaven & hearing a lecture
about it, most people would choose the lecture.
How about enlightenment?
How about ecstatic poetry?
Actually experiencing what it’s talking about & talking about it.
Rumi said that poetry is pointing towards something & walking away from it.
Gary Snyder’s “Old Woodrat’s Stinky House,”
pg.121-2 Mountains and Rivers Without End
“4000 years we’ve been using writing. The lifespan of a bristlecone pine.”
So it began, this, about 2000 B.C. and Lascaux 14,000 years ago
All things being equal, they say. (strangely)
Maybe all things are equal.
The Milky Way, our galaxy, and the big plastic bucket I found earlier today in my basement that I
plan to fill with some leftover stones I have on an old wine pallet.
I will give them to my ex-wife, Kittsu, who has some need for them, at the edges of her flowerbeds
We all know how delicious it is to say that (as intention)
and then to successfully do- that same thing again.
To go back where the three brothers were
when they decided to go back in the cave
the next day
To go even farther and further
that last room so magnificently decorated
14,000 years ago, by my brothers
Les Trois Frères
The thousands (& thousands) who live there in that dark & love the going back in it with as much joy
as I do.
Millions?
The research I am consistently interested in
is that that I do in my own consciousness
Dream and waking, clear and tranced,
singingly ecstatic and soap opera sad.
I also love black hole science and anything the
Hubble looks at. The Andromeda galaxy coming
this way.
I am going to get very tired of reading at
memorial services before going —
ghostily (lily) silent to my own
One of these notebooks,
One of these pages,
Will be the last that gets written on/in, by me.
So my archive gets consolidated and put somewhere. Maybe to be looked at,
Ever again, maybe not. (In the University of Georgia Library)
Maybe to be destroyed by a fire.
Or flood: It could be, unlikeliest of cases, covered over by earth
Or blown off in a tornadic (gale-force) wind
(Or) destroyed by some combination all those elements,
Or other ripping & tearing forces/beings/big
bobcats/peevish children
