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For National Poetry Month, I am writing and sharing samples from different poetic forms and genres. I like putting myself inside new walls to find something new in the world, and in myself.
Today's choice is the aubade, which is a love song of the morning. (A serenade is an evening love song.) An aubade could be welcoming the morning, or lamenting it, as when lovers part. There are no rules of form; it's a genre for a theme and is not a structure.
A perfectly gorgeous aubade was written by Philip Larkin. It's rather hard to say if it is an aubade to life, or to death. The text is here. His deep and lovely reading of it is here. If you do not especially enjoy reading poetry, do try listening to it. When you hear his voice, rich and clear, you understand that poetry is meant to be heard.
I am posting a beautiful aubade love song by Kenneth Patchen, a poet who also wrote poems about unbeautiful things (like murder, which I've linked below his photo at the bottom of the post). My poem has elements of both a love song and a lament, on the order of Larkin's, about a thought that has haunted me: that our children at conception and birth are given no choice about what we might assume is "the gift" of life.
L'enfant Malade, by Eugène Anatole Carrière
AubadeWhat have we done, my love, in the sigh of night
when heat from our bodies pressed
the window’s black—
an oil lamp, an irresistible yellow thumb of fire?
Our skin like wings of moths, beating
to get inside the damp. We begin a new life, fluttering
in the dark bean of my belly.
Our desire begets our desire:
A child, first flight into the family tree,
bouncing, bobbing on the boughs of glee.
But what of her desire? She grants
no permission for this heaviest coat
at the highest height.
We’ll push her out, to fly!
She’ll wake up in the gray room of dawn, and fight—
with a wail for milk, and then she will sleep,
and get up to strive again, soon enough
with the sound of coins dropping
into the well of work and wishes.
She will crave what makes her live,
yearning even for the human race,
her skin beating, like ours,
hot in the last sigh of night.
Then like me she will walk out in dawn’s silver-gray,
following the jay’s howl from the woods,
turning at a pine, as I do now,
to stumble onto a scatter of blue feathers
torn by a hawk, and feel her life.
Listen to a podcast of my poem here.
Woman Leaning on a Table, 1893, Eugène Anatole Carrière
And here is the aubade love song by Kenneth Patchen.
As We Are So Wonderfully Done with Each Otherby Kenneth Patchen
As we are so wonderfully done with each other
We can walk into our separate sleep
On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies
O my lady, my fairest dear, my sweetest, loveliest one
Your lips have splashed my dull house with the speech of flowers
My hands are hallowed where they touched over your
soft curving.
It is good to be weary from that brilliant work
It is being God to feel your breathing under me
A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning . . .
Don’t let anyone in to wake us.
~ from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen, copyright © 1942 by Kenneth Patchen.
Booker Ervin (1930-1970), left,
tenor saxophone player, with
Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972), poet;
Patchen often read his poems
accompanied by jazz;
Listen to one here.
Listen to Booker Ervin
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