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.

--Rebecca Elson

One Day I Decided

One day I decided to not grow any older

lots of luck I said to myself

(my joking self)        then I looked up at the sky

which is wide       its blueness    its whiteness

low on my left    the steamy sun rose    moved

I placed my hand against it    my whole hand

which is broad from pinky to thumb   no   my

two hands   I bared my teeth to it    my teeth

are strong   secure on their gold posts   I breathed

deeply   I held my breath    I stood on my toes    ah

then I was taller   still the clouds sailed

through me   around me    it’s true    I’m just

like them   summertime water that the sun

sips and spits into this guzzling earth

Grace Paley (2000)

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found 

a hedgehog jammed up against the blades,

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind

While there is still time.

--Philip Larkin

Winter Morning

When I can no longer say thank you

for this new day and the waking into it,

for the cold scrape of the kitchen chair

and the ticking of the space heater glowing

orange as it warms the floor near my feet,

I know it’s because I’ve been fooled again

by the selfish, unruly man who lives in me

and believes he deserves only safety

and comfort. But if I pause as I do now,

and watch the streetlights outside flashing

off one by one like old men blinking their

cloudy eyes, if I listen to my tired neighbors

slamming car doors hard against the morning

and see the steaming coffee in their mugs

kissing chapped lips as they sip and

exhale each of their worries white into

the icy air around their faces—then I can

remember this one life is a gift each of us

was handed and told to open: Untie the bow

and tear off the paper, look inside

and be grateful for whatever you find

even if it is only the scent of a tangerine

that lingers on the fingers long after

you’ve finished peeling it.

--James Crews

Notes on survival

You are allowed to break. Everything does.

The stars grow tired and fall.

The waves crash against rocks and shores.

Trees fall for both storms and the wind, leaving behind seeds

and saplings so a version of them can grow again.

Stormclouds part for the rain

and then part again for the sun to come through.

Night must break for the day and the day for the night.

The world is made of broken things piecing themselves back together

--this is what gives us the most resilient stories.

So why do you think that you were built any differently 

than the night and the stormclouds? 

You know how to put yourself back together again too,

just as well as they do.

Take heart. You have managed to rebuild yourself 

a thousand times over from every bad day.

That is no small thing.

--Nikita Gill

 “The only way to bury the past so that it will stay buried is to regard it with gratitude; otherwise it will come back to haunt us. Hatred binds us, gratitude frees us. And doubt is a form of self-hatred. Don’t doubt yourself. Regard your past with gratitude and give it a decent burial.”

—Kaz Iwaasa

November

Is there anything left to be said

about the blaze of autumn leaves --

the way they let go with such graciousness,

how they dance on the wind

and crunch under the feet and glow

in the afternoon light?

Maybe just this:

The colours fade. They turn sodden as

milky cereal in the gutters and sidewalk.

The trees look tattered, and then

vulnerable and exposed. It turns out 

that loss is really loss. Which is every bit

as much a part of the story as 

autumn's glamour. Listen.

You are not obliged to be beautiful.

You don't have to shine.

Blooming will happen when it happens.

If you can be still for a moment.

you might notice that

the roots that feed you

are still reaching silently through the dark. 

--Lynn Ungar November 18, 2020

Look out

your window.

Every falling 

autumn leaf 

is a tiny kite 

with a string 

too small to see

held by the part 

of you in charge 

of making beauty 

out of grief.

--Andrea Gibson

Hope

To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.

-- Rebecca Solnit

Do not be distracted

Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time. Do not be distracted by emotions like anger, envy, resentment. These just zap energy and waste time. So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great good fortune.

-- Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Time machine

Regret

is a time machine 

to the past.

Worry 

is a time machine 

to the future. 

Gratitude 

is a time machine 

to the present.

No one books

my travel for me.

I decide where

I want to go.

--Andrea Gibson 

The boundary between us and the rest of the world is so fluid. So I think of myself as a song the universe is singing.

-- Rebecca Henderson 

Something Like This, Anyway

If I prayed, which I don’t, 

then we could say that I asked 

god to open every door that I 

had shut, every door I did not 

know was there. 

Why I asked this, well, 

this will make sense to you 

or it won’t, but every closed 

door I was aware of 

had became a point of suffering. 

And with every open door, 

I could feel congruence, 

the world rushing in to create 

more space in me. 

And god said to me, though 

we could not say that it was a voice, 

god said, Open even the door with people jeering 

on the other side, their faces twisted 

in hate? Even the door to an entire 

forest of sorrow? And because 

this conversation was not really 

happening, we could not say that 

I said yes to the questions, but 

we could say, perhaps, that 

the yes began to root in me 

and it was not so much a matter 

of someone opening the doors 

but that the doors more or less 

dissolved. And what I had thought 

could separate me from anything else 

was shown to be nothing at all. 

I would like to tell you that I felt grace 

in the opening, but the truth

is I felt such terrible ache. 

And god did not come put a hand 

on my cheek and tell me 

everything would be okay. 

In fact, if anything, the voice 

I did not hear told me 

there are no promises. 

But I felt it, the invitation 

to keep opening doors, 

to not close my eyes, 

to not turn away. 

And though I do not pray, 

I said thank you, thank you. 

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer