Mari Pack: Fear of Death
FEAR OF DEATH
The Wikipedia page on immortality
lists aging, disease, trauma, and
environmental change as problems
to be resolved. I will resolve them
with magic.
I pull a tarot card, and the card is DEATH
strident atop his white horse
cheeks gaunt, battle flag raised
a five-petal rose, symbol of changing
things.
I like change only when it is good.
Change is good only when it gives me
money, beauty, prestige or pleasure.
When it gives me pain and dishonor
it is bad.
An evil woman on the internet says
“Death spares no one,” and she is wrong.
I will never die. I have drunk
the magic milk, and now I will live
forever.
I will live forever in my body
with its youthful, dewy sheen.
I will not become like Tithonus, a cricket.
I will not allow any Goddess
to love me.
I will love only myself. I will build a wall
of loving me. This wall will protect me
from pain, dishonor, or the five-petal rose.
It will not protect me from my want
of immortality.
Mari Pack is a poet, editor, copywriter, and radio producer from the outskirts of Washington, D.C. She earned an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Toronto in 2013, and later worked as an English teacher in Israel and copywriter in Brooklyn. Now an editor for Guideposts magazine, her essays, articles, and poems have been published in Quail Bell Magazine, The Huffington Post, and The Establishment, among others. She is a current M.F.A. candidate in Creative Writing at Hunter College, CUNY.