On The Intention Not To Slow Down

On The Intention Not To Slow Down

Share event

May 18, 2017
Ed Roberts Campus At Ashby Bart 3075 Adeline Street, Berkeley

THE TAKEAWAY: Thank you, Anita Barrows, for leading a lovely introspective evening by reading some of your poems and talking about your own process of growing older. Here is one of her poems from her book of poetry, We Are The Hunger, entitled, Tent. Also listen to Anita Barrows, The Soul of Depression.

Tent

My old blue tent rises on uneven ground,
staked tenuously against the wind
blowing off frozen buttes– held

by some twine I found
and some eight-inch metal hammered down
into dry dirt, among the busying of insects.

I have enclosed a space
which shadows of pinoak and red madrone will reinhabit

Those I love
are still asleep, near me
and in places I’ll go back to. There is a breathing of things

that comforts me. What I’m tethered to
crumbles, but not yet, not now. My living, too,

which I love

is nothing more than an enclosure
around a silence

where the intricate slow labor of breaking down
is all that continues.

May 18, 2017 Ed Roberts Campus at Ashby BART 3075 Adeline Street, Berkeley

Copyright © At Home With Growing Older