Myth of Arrival

There is far too much to tell you in one blog entry. Sunday morning, for example, I was in the mud and rain seeing Robert Bly and Coleman Barks help celebrate the Sufi mystic poet Rumi's 799th birthday with a joint reading. I expected Barks' Southern drawl spicing up the poetry but I had never seen Bly live before. He delighted in interrupting himself to ask the audience if they were following what he was saying. He was a hoot.

(Bly and Barks off-stage before their morning reading)

Barks shared with us what he called, "never been read in America before," new Rumi translations [!] I suppose that means there is a new Rumi book on its way to the publishers. The lines, "Hurry Shams, hurry back to me," got me all teary eyed. Actually, any reference to Rumi's soul-mate, Shams of Tabrizi, who disappeared out of Rumi's life forever, gets me all choked up. Imagine my surprise when I found that the youngest poet at the Dodge Festival, Ekiwah Adler-Belendez, had written a poem about searching for Shams.

(Ekiwah and his father getting set up for a reading)

Ekiwah is 19-year old young man living with cerebral palsy. He is from a small village outside of Mexico City and he is mind-blowing. The Dodge Program had this to say about him:

[Ekiwah] began composing poem fragments aloud by the age of three, and his first poetry collection, Soy (I Am), was released when he was 12. He has written, “In a way cerebral palsy has forced me to do what I love the most: stop dead in my tracks and write.” His other poetry collections include: Palabras Inagotables, (Never-ending Words) (2001); Weaver (2003), his first book in English; and The Coyote’s Trace (2006).

(Kurtis Lamkin playing his kora, a twenty-one-stringed West African harp-lute, Ekiwah singing a poem)

In Search of Shams

When I am teeth and blood
When my eyes are clods of dirt
When my skin is
a pool for tadpoles
When I have no memory
but the one of the mad butterfly
When my muscles are hollows
where squirrels nest
When my mind is
a cut in space
When my blood
turns to vinegar —
then I will lie down
I will know I have found you

My mouth repeats a single word
as it moves like a fish
swimming in the sweet water
of your name

I will get drunk with you
we will drink the wine of the sky

– Ekiwah Adler-Belendez

(Brian Turner, Kurtis Lamkin, Ekiwah Adler-Belendez)

I first saw Ekiwah in the group conversation, Going Public With Private Feelings, featuring the poets Brian Turner and Kurtis Lamkin as well. All three men are fantastic and deserve their own blog entries on their deep, spiritual humanity but it was Ekiwah who left me in awe. When people talk about "an old soul in a new body," I'll think of him.

Blue Flower Arts explains more:

Ekiwah, which means warrior in the language of the Purepecha, is an appropriate appellation. He has been battling cerebral palsy since birth — born 10 weeks early and weighing less than two pounds. Ekiwah writes, "I cannot walk by myself, yet in my poems I not only walk, but give myself license to have eight legs and experience movement. When I read a poem, on an ephemeral level I go to the places the poet describes."

Despite years of hard therapeutic work Ekiwah developed a severe scoliosis that required surgery or would prove fatal. From Mexico, the family sent X-rays to Dr. Roy Nuzzo, a Pediatric Orthopaedist and Surgeon in New Jersey — and included Ekiwah’s books and English translations … upon reading the book of poems that fell out with the X-rays, Dr. Nuzzo said, “Ekiwah is simply an extraordinary talent . . . I was trying to figure just when I was last so taken by a specific series of writings. Who so stunningly allowed the rest of us to experience so internally the feelings of another? I decided … [Ekiwah] has the force of Dante but delivered with the temperament of Poe." Nuzzo declared then that saving Ekiwah’s life was the most important thing he would ever do.

We are all blessed for having Ekiwah with us. He once said, "I think that what poets do is decipher silence." I feel blessed I had the opportunity to be part of that silence and listen to what he had to say.