Poem-A-Day: "I'm afraid of death" by Kathleen Ossip

"I'm afraid of death"  by Kathleen Ossip  I'm afraid of death because it inflates the definition of what a person is, or love, until they become the same, love, the beloved, immaterial. I'm afraid of death because it invents a different kind of time, a stopped clock that can't be reset, only repurchased, an antiquity. I'm afraid of death, the magician who makes vanish and who makes odd things appear in odd places--your name engraves itself on a stranger's chest in letters of char. Copyright © 2013 by Kathleen Ossip. Used with permission of the author. About this Poem: "In writing my new book The Do-Over, which is an exploration of death, I became aware of a subgenre of medieval English poems that begin with the first line Timor mortis conturbat me--the fear of death disturbs me. I wanted to write one, because it does. Also, I like counting syllables." Kathleen Ossip Poetry by Ossip The Cold War   Poem-A-Day launched in 2006 and features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.   Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org. May 3, 2013   Kathleen Ossip is the author of two books of poems. Her most recent is The Cold War  (Sarabande, 2011). She is the Poetry Editor for Women's Studies Quarterly and teaches at The New School. Related Poems Because I could not stop for Death (712) by Emily Dickinson For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell What Came to Me by Jane Kenyon

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