Antidotes To Fear Of Death

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

This was a poem written by astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson when she battled with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I find this poem comforting in the midst of the rising fears going around in our ever-changing and unpredictable circumstances of COVID-19. We are after all stardust and knowing how fear can eat away our flesh and presence at the moment, perhaps the antidote to it is to picture swallowing bits of stars into our body, to renew and rejuvenate ourselves in their mystical presence.

ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH by Rebecca Elson

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 sometimes 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.

With love and light,
Maybelline