In front of the John Lennon Wall in Prague.




Monday, April 6, 2015

National Poetry Month: April 6, 2015

NaPoWriMo Day 6: Today’s prompt springs from the form known as the aubade. These are morning poems, about dawn and daybreak. Many aubades take the form of lovers’ morning farewells, but . . . today is Monday. So why not try a particularly Mondayish aubade…


Monday Aubade

Four of us to get to school, four bowls of cereal or scrambled eggs,
Mom from table to stove, from one need to the next.

Dad long gone, having drunk his coffee and climbed into his truck
driving off into pre-dawn darkness.

Monday when beds stripped of weekend lay empty,
school books gathered and sneakers lost, then found.

Dawn peered over the trees across the farm field,
birds chattered in the oak outside the kitchen window.

Four squabbles, milk spilled on the plastic tablecloth,
dog under our feet searching for scraps.

My mother’s face grim-set.

Soon the fat yellow bus would arrive for my brother and me,
soon my sisters would make their way to school down the street.

Soon the house would fall hushed except for clicking
of doggy nails across the kitchen floor.

Now I wonder what my mother did.

Would she sit and watch the day come awake,
just sit with coffee cup nested in her hands?

Completely still,  gazing out at her garden before she shook herself out
and cleared the plates to set in soapy water.




6 comments:

  1. Lisa, even though I'm not doing many of these prompts, I am recording them all...they are wonderful! I'm really enjoying the variety, and also enjoying seeing what you do with them as you own personal tweak! Thanks for being brave enough to post each day! Love, M.

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  2. Michelle, Thank you for your feedback! You know how I love prompts. xo Lisa

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  3. I got caught up in my own mornings (though getting no one off to school) and failed to thank you for this beautiful evocation of childhood mornings.I love the double vision, wondering -- from your adult viewpoint -- what the mother did after everyone was gone.

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  4. Ruth, thank you again. I am becoming more and more intrigued by what you call double vision - my own viewpoint as well as that of the other.

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  5. Lisa, love this from kid view and from tired mother view...and I hope your mother sat long enough for that cup of coffee to warm her palms, and then some. Lovely, Lisa.

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