What happens to poets when they die

Dedicated to the poet Andrea Gibson

I was broken back then; well, I felt broken and disillusioned with my life. Oh the sweet and innocent disenchantments of mid-30s but utterly necessary, utterly life-affirming after all. It was 2 BD (before Debraji) and I had my first deep dive into the dark basement of my psyche. It was the beginning of my descent to soul ¹ and waking up from slumber, thanks to a severe burnout. Little did I know that this descent would lead me, slowly but surely, to my mythopoetic identity².

As soon as I bowed down to the wild stream of my life that decidedly carried me forward to some other destination than I had planned, something miraculous happened. Poems started appearing, arriving out of nowhere.

You know how we “stumble upon” some of the most defining and treasured experiences of our lives? My dear Holy Mischievian, I do not believe that we stumble upon them; I think they long for us, they seek us and they come right at us. They are sent for us as helpers and medicine we didn’t even know we needed until we found ourselves head over heels in that situation. Just like that, poetry came rushing to usher me out of my misery into the mystery of living.

When people say poetry saved their lives, believe them, because poems do save lives. They shatter the loneliness that has a chokehold on our joy for too long; they melt the grief frozen in our chest and transmute it to a holy libation that moisten and soften the sacred soil of our hearts. A poem can visit early morning to sip coffee with you as you try to gather courage for the new day. Another one jumps on your lap and gives you the right words to remedy your longing, when love burns beauty marks on your skin. Poetry will come find you like an angel willing to abandon eternity out of love for a human, and offer you exactly what you need, exactly at the right moment.

So, if poems save lives, does that make poets some kind of saints?
Oh yes, it does!

Where do the saints reside?

When Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer and his family got killed by an Israeli bombardment in Gaza in December 2023, he prophetically spoke to us through his poem, “If I must die” which he wrote more than a decade before his death:

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story …

He entrusted his story, his memory and his poems to us, to the kind strangers forever haunted by his plea; and thus, his death becomes a seed, a prayer for a free Palestine, that has been planted in our hearts. That is where the dead poets go apparently, to the human heart where the verses take on a life of their own.

I will never let Mary Oliver or Rilke too far from my sight. It is as if we traveled lifetimes together. I will never not seek refuge between the lines of their poems. Poet saints reside right there, in the quiet inhale and exhale dancing around the holy words they gift us. They become the voice of mystery, gently threading the loose ends of our lives where the world seems to come apart at the seams.

On July 14, 2025 Andrea Gibson, beloved poet, activist and the Poet Laureate of Colorado died at their home, surrounded by their loved ones. They were an artist I have been following on social media in the past few years. Even though the power of their words came from their wholehearted embrace of living in the liminal space of terminal illness and imminent death, their art, their breathtaking poems were never only about the grief of profound loss but they were really about the fierce heat of loving and living in this world. Mary Oliver would have been so proud of her fellow poet, smiling I am sure from another realm and murmuring lines from her poem “When Death Comes”:

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

What followed Andrea’s death was a public outpouring of love and appreciation on a scale I’ve never witnessed before: for their courage, for their sincere and honest poetic wonderings about life and death, for how they lived their life with utmost integrity and commitment to love. Though I was saddened by their death, I was even more moved by how much a poet could be loved and celebrated. We love our poets because they keep the flame of the soul lit in this world, even when the majority of us feel lost in despair and bitterness. Those poets who take dictation from life itself, no matter what happens, point us in the direction of the mystery of love.
My kind of saints.

What happens to poets when they die?

They go on to become poems themselves.
(Do you know how many love poems were written for Andrea after their passing?)

When poets die, like fireworks or a supernova, the love they tended at the altar of poetry is shattered into thousands of pieces and rains on us as a final gesture of their generosity. We, the poem whisperers, those of us who journey with poetry, are blessed and entrusted with a piece of our beloved poets’ creative fire.

Thank you Andrea Gibson for inspiring this week’s Holy Mischief writing. It is dedicated to you and to all poets we love.

How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best

“When you are trapped in a nightmare, your motivation to awaken will be so much greater than that of someone caught up in a relatively pleasant dream.”
—Eckhart Tolle

When I realized the storm
was inevitable, I made it
my medicine.

Took two snowflakes
on the tongue in the morning,
two snowflakes on the tongue
by noon.

There were no side effects.
Only sound effects. Reverb
added to my lifespan,
an echo that asked—

What part of your life’s record is skipping?
What wound is on repeat?
Have you done everything you can
to break out of that groove?

By nighttime, I was intimate
with the difference
between tying my laces
and tuning the string section

of my shoes, made a symphony of walking
away from everything that did not
want my life to sing.

Felt a love for myself so consistent
metronomes tried to copyright my heartbeat.

Finally understood I am the conductor
of my own life, and will be even after I die.
I, like the trees, will decide what I become:

Porch swing? Church pew?
An envelope that must be licked to be closed?
Kinky choice, but I didn’t close.

I opened and opened
until I could imagine that the pain
was the sensation of my spirit
not breaking,

that my mind was a parachute
that could always open
in time,

that I could wear my heart
on my sleeve and never grow
out of that shirt.

That every falling leaf is a tiny kite
with a string too small to see, held
by the part of me in charge
of making beauty
out of grief.

Andrea Gibson

1. “A psychospiritual expedition into one particular precinct of the underworld — the precinct I call Soul Canyon — and, if fortunate, the eventual emergence from those depths having been radically transformed by an encounter with Soul. The Descent is the most significant element of the journey of soul initiation.”
Bill Plotkin

2. “The way we consciously identify and experience the nature of Soul — namely, through metaphor in the form of poetic or mythic images or patterns. Since it’s not possible to directly describe our eco-niche in everyday descriptive language, we comprehend and appreciate it mythopoetically. Essentially what Carl Jung meant by “personal myth.””
Bill Plotkin