a cosmic therapy for our fear of death

The power of metaphor. It's natural, at an animal level, to fear death - it's a survival instinct. But if, instead of avoiding it, we stay with it, meditate, or read, contemplate, let symbol and metaphor help us, we can sometimes come to some sort of terms with it. I think avoiding it just strengthens its hold over us. I think this poem is pretty splendid.

Antidotes to Fear of Death

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

Till 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.

Rebecca Elson

There is a sting in the tail for those (me included) who didn't know that Rebecca Elson died at the age of 39 from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. She was a distinguished astronomer and a poet. What a loss. One could say, about this poem, that she knew whereof she wrote.

Thanks to Kathryn Edwards for passing this on to me.