An Aubade is a song of the dawn, usually linked with the motif of waking lovers and their reluctant parting.
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare.
Not in remorse-
The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always.
Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says
No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink.
Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others.
Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept.
One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
-Philip Larkin
Aubade-
Hark! hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings,
And Phoebus ‘gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chaliced flowers that lies;
And winking Mary-buds begin
To open their golden eyes:
With everything that pretty bin,
My lady sweet, arise!
Arise, arise!
-William Shakespeare-
Aubade
First minutes of morning.
You
about to call it a night, me
ready for another day.
The birds
loud, echoes in the stillness
of not-yet-day.
The neighbors’
shower water rumbling through walls
like half-heard promises.
Our bodies
stiff—yours too long at the computer,
mine from deep sleep.
We don’t speak.
So it is a surprise to hear
your deep “please,”
lips pressed to my ear,
to feel
water and hands cascade
down my body.
-Beverly Acuff Momoi
-Aubade
Not even the sky.
But a memory of sky,
and the blue of the earth
in your lungs.
Earthless earth: to watch
how the sky will enclose you, grow vast
with the words
you leave unsaid – and nothing
will be lost.
I am your distress, the seam
in the wall
that opens to the wind
and its stammering, storm
in the plural – this other name
you give your world: exile
in the rooms of home.
Dawn folds, fathers
witness,
the aspen and the ash
that fall. I come back to you
through this fire, a remnant
of the season to come,
and will be to you
as dust, as air,
as nothing
that will not haunt you.
In the place before breath
we feel our shadows cross.
-Paul Auster-
Aubade
My joy is the same as twelve holsteins
Standing in the morning light
Ugly Ragged Not clean
Like the thin cry of a calf
Like an angel sinking it’s teeth into my throat
The long windows open
The sidewalks puddle underfoot
Black and white winters
The pace steady, undefined
Under a street-lamp and off into ongoingness
An irregular wind brushes my curtains aside
A whirlwind of rotten fabric
Bursting from the nostrils
To float
Before they fall.
-Emily Christensen (My Aubade)-
