I’m struggling with the political news these days.  The bombardment of corruption and lies stuns.  How then do we revive, bring in the tide?

I find support in  Rebecca Elson’s poem from her book, A Responsibility to Awe.  She was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma at the age of 29. She continued her writing and scientific work until she died of the disease at the age of 39. I offer the first two stanzas, and then can’t stop and give the whole poem. 

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.

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.