The speaker opens with a bold declaration, "I am not afraid!", and then explains why: they have lived alongside death for so long that it feels like a friend. Death here is not frightening but strangely gentle, something like an undiscovered flower or a song not yet written. From there the poem turns to a loved one the speaker may never actually meet, a bond that is both "never meeting" and "always being met."
The speaker makes a series of promises: to walk beside this person, to love them enough to let them go and still never leave, and to live and die a thousand times until they find them again in small, quiet things like paper trees, the moon, a stone. The mood is calm, devoted and quietly hopeful, with a touch of ache. The final line, bringing someone home "where home has never been," suggests a love that creates its own place of belonging, even where none existed before.