Rebecca Elson, Astronomer-Poet
2 January 1960 - 19 May 1999
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 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.
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