POEMS ABOUT FEAR ...

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses, who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, 1903, translated by M.D. Herter Norton, 1954.

 

Advice to the Fearful Self

If necessary, go through madness.

If necessary, walk through a wall of fire.

Let the flames eat your hand.

Let your body shrivel like the top of a burnt match-stick.

If necessary, drown.

Walk undersea like the deepsea diver

but without his mask or oxygen supply.

Let the waves close over you.

See above your head

the webbed feet of seabirds

flying in water

.

If necessary, be buried live.

Let sand clog your nostrils.

Close your mouth on pebbles.

In the frozen ground

stiffen with with winter.

If necessary, be conceived again.

Swim in the riverf of the womb

till, cast up fishlike on dry land

you grow a mouth and scream.

If necessary, scream.

Elizabeth Brewster