Hi, it's Maggie. For the next two weeks of episodes, friend of the show, Samia Bashir,

will be sharing poems with you every morning. I'll be back in the host chair on February 18th.

I'm Samia Bashir, and this is The Slowdown.

In 2009, I was grateful to be awarded a Kavei Kahnem Scholarship to attend the community of writers in Lake Tahoe.

I got to work with and study with some of my favorite writers.

What sticks with me to this day is an experience that continues to connect me to lineage, students, teachers,

and the very idea of time and artistic growth.

When I arrived, and for weeks before,

I had been trying to make real a poem about apian colony collapse.

This environmental breakdown of bee colonies around the world sets off a cascade of harm and destruction

for us all. Our survival on this planet is not singular, but communal. Bees don't just pollinate

our food. They are the key to ecological continuity. What I'd been trying to do was mark this moment of die casting.

The alarm systems colony collapse represents warn us that we have to do something, repair

something now, or the worldwide consequences will be devastating. You know, something simple.

A poem.

No biggie, right?

That year, Galway Canal was a guest poet.

We poets had the opportunity to have a powerful workshop with him

under the Northern California Lakeside Pines.

The process at community of writers is that we all drafted new poems each night,

even the instructors, and shared them with each other during workshop the next morning.

That day, Galway Connell shared a poem he'd written the night before, Exeunt the Bees.

...