Ruminations was inspired by the thirteenth century poet, scholar, and Sufi mystic, Rumi, who wrote in his native tongue, Persian. I am grateful to Coleman Barks for his sensitive and insightful translations of Rumi’s poetry as well as for his stories about Rumi’s life. Each of my poems is inspired by a line or a thought from one of Rumi’s. Poet Katharine Harer says of the book: Judy Bebelaar’s poems are a meditation on “life’s persistence” as she invites us into her dance with the Sufi poet, Rumi. Bebelaar isn’t shy about combining grief and joy, unimaginable loss and the embrace of the “summer-soft hills.” #poetry #Rumi #ruminations #love #griefandloss #beautyofnature #whirlingdervish
For 37 years, Judy Bebelaar enjoyed teaching in the San Francisco public high schools. She especially loved teaching creative writing, finding it to be the best way to reach her students and to encouragethem to get to know and understand one another. Over the years, her students won many awards, both locally and on the national level, including the National Scholastic Writing Contest. In 2000, when eight of her students became winners, Judy was awarded a national prize from Scholastic to honor the excellence of her teaching. Her poetry has been published widely in magazines and in nine anthologies, including The Widows’ Handbook (Kent State University Press; forward by Ruth Bader Ginsburg). A chapbook, Walking Across the Pacific, was published in 2014 (Finishing Line Press), and in 2023, a full-length poetry book, Sky Holding Fall, was published by Blue Light Press. A nonfiction book written with Ron Cabral, And Then They Were Gone: Teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown (Sugartown Press, 2018), has won ten honors and awards, among them four first prizes, and both Ron and Judy were named San Francisco Library Laureates.
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Judy Bebelaar’s new collection of poetry lets the calm continual turning at the center of Rumi’s spirit move us again, through delicate observations of love, mortality, and nature’s joys. Reflections of her husband, lost to cancer decades ago, are particularly poignant, yet all the poems navigate time and place beautifully, and can be likened, as she says at the end of “Aspen,” to “roots below the clone/(that) flow in Rumi’s rings.”
–Eliot Schain, author of “The Distant Sound”
Judy Bebelaar’s poems are a meditation on “life’s persistence” as she invites us into her dance with the Sufi poet, Rumi. Bebelaar isn’t shy about combining grief and joy, unimaginable loss and the embrace of the “… summer-soft hills.” She recalls the “fat fruit” of an apricot tree and her husband, John’s, lean, tanned body. Both man and tree are gone; still, Bebelaar admits to a “strange elation” in just “being here. . . surging forward.” Her quiet acceptance rubs off on us, and we feel calmer, grateful for the time we’ve spent with her. In the final poem of this exquisite collection, she asks for “more days, please,” more life.
–Katharine Harer, author of Deconfliction
In Ruminations, Judy Bebelaar uses quotations from Rumi as the starting points for exquisite poems that reflect her own experiences of love, loss, and awe. Beauty and wonder abound in these poems: “This flock of birds, / their wings dark knives / cutting sapphire.” In poems at once sturdy and delicate, Bebelaar reminds us to hang onto hope in our troubled world: “In spite of missing birds / and poisoned bees, / Spring still holds her promises.”
–Lucille Lang Day, author of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place
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