Summer Aubade by Margaret Phillips

Here is an elegant well-crafted poem by Margaret Phillips of Eastham, MA. It’s clear and direct in the way it describes closeness and separation in a relationship – read it slowly and allow the tone and mood to resonate with your own experience, memories, and feelings.

– Barry Hellman
Cape Cod Poetry Group

Summer Aubade

Out our window
hangs a slice
of setting moon,
and you
are deeply sleeping.
I wash my face, and drive
to drink my coffee
at the beach
at Boat Meadow.

I look for the willet
in marsh grass,
to see the flash
of white on brown
on her rising wings,
to hear her song of
“yellow, oh
yellow, oh yellow.”

The bay’s
sands and stones
in sea folds
under mist
under the blue;
and in our dark blue bed,
you are sleeping.

Margaret Phillips lived and taught in Indiana, Germany and Japan before moving to Cape Cod in 1989.

She won the Cape Cod Cultural Center’s Regional Poetry Contest in 2013 and recently was a Spotlight Reader at The Cape Cod Poetry Group’s May 2015 Poetry and Music event.

Margaret’s work has been published in the Boston Globe, online at MassPoetry, and is forthcoming in the Aurorean, Naugatuck River Review and St. Petersburg Review.

Poet’s Comment:

One summer morning all seemed right and beautiful, and I wrote “Summer Aubade.” An aubade is a poem that is love song in the morning. I hoped to catch the warmth and freshness of morning in late June in Eastham, and my happiness in our long and fulfilling relationship.

— Margaret Phillips