Serenade
Sing me a serenade.
Lovers sleeping by Meredith O’Neal (How beautiful is this painting! I will be placing an order for my wedding anniversary)
Author’s Note: I recently reread Philip Larkin’s Aubade and it lingered with me, as no doubt the poet would have wished. This poem is perhaps my subconscious responding to it.
An aubade is a song for parting lovers at dawn. A serenade is sung at dusk.
Serenade
As I struggle to rise from bed
it seems strange to me
that we so fear death.
When we chase the cessation
of self and sense,
all our lives.
The union and climax of sex,
the blur of drunkenness.
Opium’s long, warm forgetting.
The concert pianist,
emptied of everything but the music.
The obliterating terror
of the body in free fall.
Every ecstatic breathless marathon,
perfect stillness in meditation.
The self dissolving in a prayer.
Eight hours of dreamless sleep,
you by my side.
Your heartbeat now
more important to me
than mine.
Perhaps thought
was always the problem,
and reason no solution.
So if I die. Imagine these,
and do not weep, love.
Do not weep.
The dead do not weep,
sing me a serenade.
So profound. So beautiful in that navigation between sleep and death. And thank you for “aubade.” Never heard that word, and it’s a perfect one.
How do you just place words like this and rip my heart in the beautiful process?!? For many reasons I’ve been trying to better deal with the terminal nature of our living. And here you’ve captured it so beautifully…and then just turned that ending onto the one thing that makes it all worth it, love.