Featured Poem: Antidotes to Fear of Death by Rebecca Elson

Today's Featured Poem is Antidotes to Fear of Death by Rebecca Elson, read by The Reader's Volunteer Recruitment Coordinator, Jess.

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
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.

By Rebecca Elson 

'Antidotes to Fear of Death' appears in Rebecca Elson's poetry collection 'Responsibility to Awe', published by Carcanet Press Limited. Reading rights for this poem have been kindly granted to us by Carcanet Press Limited.