Great Regulars: Poetry's roots in sacred song are undeniable.

Native American hunters around a fire praised the Great Spirit for sending buffalo. In other cultures, tillers of the soil begged a cloudless sky to split open and loose down rain. I would rank Robert Bly's translations of Kabir--a 15th-century Indian ecstatic poet raised Muslim and infused with wisdom from both the Sufis and Hindus--up there with the Hebrew Psalms and the Song of Solomon. In this poem, Kabir refers to the soul as "my inner lover":

I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such

from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice

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