Antidotes to Fear of Death
POETRY FORMAT, 20 Apr 2020
Rebecca Elson – TRANSCEND Media Service
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
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The astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson (2 Jan 1960 – 19 May 1999) was twenty-nine when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma — a blood cancer that typically invades people in their sixties and seventies. Throughout the bodily brutality of the treatment, throughout the haunting uncertainty of life in remission, she met reality on its own terms — reality creaturely and cosmic, terms chance-dealt by impartial laws — and made of that terrifying meeting something uncommonly beautiful.
Tags: COVID-19, Coronavirus, Death, Fear, Inspirational, Mental Health, Pandemic, Poetry
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 20 Apr 2020.
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