{"id":158173,"date":"2020-04-20T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2020-04-20T11:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=158173"},"modified":"2020-04-12T07:08:29","modified_gmt":"2020-04-12T06:08:29","slug":"antidotes-to-fear-of-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/04\/antidotes-to-fear-of-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Antidotes to Fear of Death"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes as an antidote<br \/>\nTo fear of death,<br \/>\nI eat the stars<\/p>\n<p>Those nights, lying on my back,<br \/>\nI suck them from the quenching dark<br \/>\nTil they are all, all inside me,<br \/>\nPepper hot and sharp.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes, instead, I stir myself<br \/>\nInto a universe still young,<br \/>\nStill warm as blood:<\/p>\n<p>No outer space, just space,<br \/>\nThe light of all the not yet stars<br \/>\nDrifting like a bright mist,<br \/>\nAnd all of us, and everything<br \/>\nAlready there<br \/>\nBut unconstrained by form.<\/p>\n<p>And sometime it\u2019s enough<br \/>\nTo lie down here on earth<br \/>\nBeside our long ancestral bones:<\/p>\n<p>To walk across the cobble fields<br \/>\nOf our discarded skulls,<br \/>\nEach like a treasure, like a chrysalis,<br \/>\nThinking: whatever left these husks<br \/>\nFlew off on bright wings.<\/p>\n<p>________________________________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/Rebecca-Elson-1987.jpg\" ><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-158174\" src=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/Rebecca-Elson-1987-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a><em>The astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson (2 Jan 1960 \u2013 19 May 1999) was twenty-nine when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma \u2014 a blood cancer that typically invades people in their sixties and seventies. Throughout the bodily brutality of the treatment, throughout the haunting uncertainty of life in remission, she met reality on its own terms \u2014 reality creaturely and cosmic, terms chance-dealt by impartial laws \u2014 and made of that terrifying meeting something uncommonly beautiful.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes as an antidote<br \/>\nTo fear of death,<br \/>\nI eat the stars<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":158174,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[1829,1868,1169,553,1177,734,1864,868],"class_list":["post-158173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-format","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-death","tag-fear","tag-inspirational","tag-mental-health","tag-pandemic","tag-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}