Antidotes to Fear of Death

Every time we go to work, we step into the path of a deadly infection. Poet and astronomer Rebecca Elson, in Antidotes to Fear of Death, offers up the vastness of the universe as a counterpoint to fear and dread. She reminds us that our experience is not new—that humans have always feared extinction, and that we might find comfort in the infinite nature of space and time. Thank you to author Beth Hahn, my teacher at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, for sending me this poem.

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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.