Aubade – a poem by Kathleen A Wakefield

Aubade

4:00 a.m., wide awake. 
Coffee, toast, a book. 

By 5:00, exhausted, poor excuse 
for being human.

I slip outside into the last of the cool night air.

A breeze strokes the birch’s 
dangling branches into the mane 
of a tender beast.

Tell me, why am I on this earth?

I hear my good friend laughing, 
what she’d say,
You are here. Simple. 
That’s it.

And mostly she’s happy.

The rose petals of the impatiens
flare from the dark.

How long can I stand here praying 
and to what? 

To have loved, 
that is the thing.
 
The crickets churn like a quiet engine 
turning earth toward the day.

Kathleen A Wakefield‘s first book of poetry, Notations on the Visible World (2000), won the 1999 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her second book Grip, Give and Sway was published by Silver Birch Press (2016). Her poems have appeared in such journals as the Alaska Quarterly Review, Blue Line, The Georgia Review, Hubbub, HumanaObscura, Image, One, Poetry, Rattle, River Styx, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, and Visions International. She has taught creative writing at the Eastman School of Music, the University of Rochester, as a poet-in-the-schools, and share poetry through public libraries.