Pogue,

I came across this the other day while reading around. It fits so well with a recent letter I’ve written to you. Better than I initially realised.

Written by Rebecca Elson, sharing a view that I’ve suggested towards death, that we are only passing on and shedding our bodies to go to better things (remember the Ram Dass quote that death is “like shedding an ill fitting shoe”?). She even allures to bird flight with her “Flew off on bright wings” which echoes the thoughts we shared on birds.

Then there’s the unfortunate fact that she is another life lost all to early. A life that was filled with beauty and promise.

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.