Lalla-Naked-Song

It gave me the daring to take hold
of the darkness and tear it down
and cut it into little pieces.
Reducing shadowcloth to shreds and patches is fine work for
poetry. Sometimes abstract, and other times wonderfully imaged,
her short-song scissor-bites cut free the conventional veils and
solaces, the light-blockers, that hide our own soul-nakedness. She
leaves us out in the open with nothing on, like the new moon.
---Coleman Barks
Bibliography
Grierson, Sir George and Barnett, Lionel D. Lalla-Vakyani, the
Wise Sayings of Lai Ded, A Mystic Poetess of Ancient Kashmir.
Royal Asiatic Society (London, 1920).
Lalleshwari, poems rendered by Muktananda and Gurumayi.
SYDA Foundation (South Fallsburg, N.Y., 1981). This is an
especially valuable work, as Gurumayi is the living inheritor
of this enlightened lineage.
Nisargadatta. I Am That, Acorn Press (Durham, N.C., 1973).
Kashmiri Lyrics, selected and translated by J. L. Kaul. Rinemisray
(Srinigar, 1945).
Kaul, Jayalal. Lai Ded. Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi, 1973).
Kotru, Nil Kanth. Lai Ded, Her Life and Sayings. Utpal Publications
(Srinigar, 1989).
Temple, Richard Carnac. The Word ofLalla the Prophetess. Cambridge
University Press (Cambridge, 1924).
Women Saints of the East and West, edited by Swami Ghanananda
and Sir John Stewart-Wallace. Vedanta Press (Hollywood,
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Miranda Shaw for introducing me to Lalla, and
the dancer Zuleikha and my sister Betsy (the novelist Elizabeth
Cox), for helping with various re-writings of these poems.