I love the fact that one of the newspapers here, in England, in the book review section, has a weekly poem feature: The Independent’s Sunday Poem for today is:
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:
Nouter 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