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With inevitable sadness, yesterday afternoon my mother, Barbara Mioore Vincent died at the age of 96. During the past few years, among many of us here, she became known for her proclivity to dictate her own poems, often improvising freely off the work of modernist writers such as Joanne Kyger, Rexroth, Ginsberg, Levertov, Gertrude Stein and others whose works I would read to her.Much of her out put was published, most recently a group of poems in Eaogh’s issue on aging, edited by Susan Schultz. For most of her public life, she was a politician, City planner, and environmental activist in the San Francisco Bay Area, including being a founding member of Save the Bay. On the Richmond shoreline, the Barbara and Jay Vincent Park , now part of the Federal Park System, is a commemoration of the efforts of my parents to preserve the Bay from industrial destruction. A graduate and veteran of many of this country’s 20th century natural, human and economic upheavals, she had an incorrigible sense of honesty, bravery and sometimes humor in confronting the reality of the various hands into which she was dealt. As not long after my father dieed: January will open the horrible threat. February will break off a few of the wicked. March the winds will blow and frighten everybody. April will break my heart. May will come whisking through. June is hard to decipher. July will never stop to say hello. August is jolly and happy for people like me. September is hard to take. October is full of joy for very few. November marks the worst that could ever come. December for many it’s love and joy But not for me. Barabara Moore Vincent 1916 - 2012