If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read-Around is 3/07/2024 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

My Thoughts

One preemptive genius zone for humantiy is the ability to take multiple perspectives, especailly when confronted with the finality of death. We make a play of the haunted mansion to kid us into dancing with the reaper throughout our lives. It is critical we do so becasue all desire is built on second chances, on the deep seeded belief in something better, whether it is the quenching of a thirst or the challenge of navigating stars or any other thing we do for the sake of a future and often, in spite of our past. Why walk out into the storm if lightening can take us out? Why mount our metal steeds if we are one red light from our maker? Why risk the inevitability of breaking our own heart by laying it on the table? But what else can we do if we do not want to live a half life? If we do not want to crawl out of our shell when called and suddenly realize we could have actually lived and loved our whole life here. Poet-Astronmer Rebecca Elson offers “Antidotes to The Fear of Death,” whether by zooming out to the vastness of space or zoomng in to the long ancestral bones of the earth; whether by becoming unconstrained like the drifting mist of unborn stars or the singular embodiment of bright wings emerging from the husk of the chrysalis. Why not be the bee with a thousand eyes drawn to the aura of nectar? Your thin translucent wings defying gravity, the heft of your body held aloft by the incredulous beauty of something better.

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
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/23/poem-of-the-week-antidotes-to-fear-of-death-by-rebecca-elson

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a list poem of “antidotes to the fear of death.”

  2. Take any fear you suffer (fear of speaking in public, fear of the dark) and write antidotes to that fear.

  3. Consider any fear and write what happens when you zoom out to the immediate context and then to larger and larger contexts in time (past or future or both) , or space (the place, the city, the state the country, the world etc.) or number (larger and larger groups of people, etc.)

  4. Consider any fear and write what happens when you zoom into it (nto the sensations of fear, and then to components of the sensation, to the general and specific pyshiology, down to the excitation of molecules, etc.)

  5. Journal or write a poem based on the idea of “stirring yourself into the universe” (or whatever the context)

  6. Boil down a new perspective on death to some simple basic thing as when Elson says, “And sometime it’s enough
    To lie down here on earth…” You can use this prhase as your prompt: To overcome the fear of death, sometimes it’s enough to…”

  7. Journal or write a poem emerging fromthe chrysalis after something in you or your life died.

  8. Journal or write a poem about what it means and what it might be like to be your own illumination.