Picnic, Lightning by Billy Collins

With the start of this poem, the reader first thinks that the speaker is going to talk about his fear of death given that his "mother died in a freak accident" (1).  However, the speaker goes on to discuss his accepting of the fact that death will find everyone no matter what he or she does.  The speaker gives examples of freak accidents that could happen in one's home at any time, showing how death is eminent: "It is possible to be struck by a meteor / or a single-engine plane / while reading in a chair at home" (3-5).  By giving these specific examples as opposed to preventable scenarios or events that happen outside of the house, the speaker is showing that death is not something one should avoid by not living one's life to the fullest and by living in fear.  However, the speaker also expresses that he thinks about death's inevitable nature far beyond what is healthy as he says that "This is what [he] think[s] about / when [he] shovel[s] compost" (20-21).  Although the speaker does not express extreme amounts of anxiety and fear regarding death coming for him, he does express and unnatural, unhealthy fixation on its inevitability.  But, in the end, he considers how time is forever passing, "as one hour sweeps into the next," and death is one step closer for every person (40).