What about an AUBADE?

It is a “dawn poem”  that is set at sunrise – and usually, it is about the parting of lovers.  One of the best known aubades is in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet  when she says: “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day. / It was the nightingale, and not the lark / That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear.”

Alabama’s Irene Latham in What Came Before, published by Negative Capability Press wrote the following poem:

Aubade
(Irene Latham)

That last morning
our skin glowed
the pink glow
of the newly-hatched

and we cried
the raw cry lovers
make when love is easy
but nothing else is.

Years pass
and still we question
the questions

while the answers
bend the way
time bends
in accordion song--

the memory of one
morning stretching
wide as a Montana
morning sky

then the memory of years
apart compressed
into the single compression
of light cast by a prairie star.

This is the song
we sing to each other.
This is the song that sings
us awake in the mornings,
all silver tongues
and pink light.

---

Won’t you write an aubade?

Irene Latham poet, and novelist, lives in Birmingham, Alabama She serves as poetry editor for the Birmingham Arts Journal.  See www.irenelatham.com.