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.