In Athens, May arrives with chapel bells, crowded sidewalks, final papers, graduation photographs, and the strange awareness that something important is ending just as something new begins. Few writers understood that feeling better than Coleman Barks. 

Barks, Athens poet, translator of Rumi, and professor emeritus of English in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, died Feb. 23, 2026, at age 88. Yet even months after his death, his work continues to feel especially present during spring in Athens, a season he captured with unusual clarity in his poem “The Final, Final.” 

The poem follows an English professor who oversleeps his last final exam. Comic at first, the piece slowly becomes something deeper: a meditation on missed moments, endings, regret, teaching, and mortality itself. As students leave campus each May, the emotional world of the poem still feels familiar across North Campus and Park Hall. 

“This morning will not come back this afternoon,” Barks writes. 

The poem was featured prominently during a celebration of Barks’ life April 23 at the UGA Chapel, where family members, friends, former students, and fellow writers gathered to remember him. His son Cole read Robert Penn Warren’s “Tell Me a Story,” echoing a line Barks often used to begin public readings: “Tell me a story of deep delight.” Barks’ grandchildren also spoke, and musician Chris Martin of Coldplay performed at the piano. 

The service reflected the unusual cultural space Barks occupied in Athens, where the university and town often overlap through music, literature, performance, and friendship. Though internationally known for his translations of Rumi, Barks remained deeply rooted in local life. Many of his poems were grounded in Athens itself, attentive to ordinary conversations, changing seasons, and the rhythms of the academic year. 

Kenneth Tapscott, who studied with Barks in the Franklin English Department in 1978, said Barks’ work searched constantly for what existed beneath the visible world. 

“Putting that into words is what Barks was interested in and what he strove to communicate in his poetry and in his work with Rumi,” Tapscott said. 

Elizabeth Wright, recently retired distinguished research professor and former associate academic director for the Willson Center, said the memorial service demonstrated the lasting connection between Athens and the university community. 

“An invitation to reflect on the impact of Coleman Barks is an opportunity to take stock of the unrivaled cultural riches that result when Athens as a community intertwines with the university,” Wright said. “This celebration of a singular, brilliant life leaves powerful reminders that Franklin is the heart and soul of UGA.” 

Wright also recalled the distinctly local character of the day’s events, which included a bagpipe procession to the Manhattan Café, barbecue at Little Kings, and apricot pie shared among friends and family. 

For many in Athens, Barks became inseparable from spring itself. Poet and former Wofford College professor John Lane remembered seeing Barks during an earlier May visit to Athens and asking what he was writing. 

“He said the great line, smiling: ‘a poem called “May Day! May Day!”’” Lane recalled. 

That mixture of humor, warmth, reflection, and existential curiosity also runs through “The Final, Final.” Near the end of the poem, Barks imagines death not as catastrophe, but as the realization that a gathering has already ended before one arrives. “The backyard party with your friends is breaking up,” he writes. “Where have you been?” 

The final moments of the memorial returned to that same emotional register. A recording of Barks reading “The Final, Final” played through the chapel, including its references to “illegal pulls” on the UGA chapel bell. Outside, Athens was deep into spring semester’s end, with students preparing to leave campus for the summer or for good. 

In many ways, the poem now reads as both farewell and instruction. Barks urges readers to remain awake to the fleeting beauty of ordinary life: classrooms, friendships, conversations, afternoons in May. “Emptying out is the point,” he writes. “Be early.” 

Months after his death, that sensibility still lingers across Athens each spring, in the spaces between graduation and goodbye, and in the recognition that the living moments Barks wrote about are already passing even as they unfold.