a universe still young

Picture is a quick snap of the night-sky; taken from our tenement flat, back door - everything outside feels very, very still at the moment ...

... and here's a really rather wonderful Rebecca Elson poem, which was reproduced in today's Guardian (also definitely worth reading the accompanying analysis in that link):


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.

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Rebecca Elson (1960 - 1999)

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