Aubade

All evening the moth has flown into and through the light,
each wing, half a heart, flying across the room.
And you with your new love, and I with my lost loves
have an aubade to write, before the sun seeks us out

with its big appetite, its hundred hungry arms.

Yes, we have only this night,
the red wine, the crumbs on the table,
the dog half-smiling in her sleep,

this sweet urgency, this darkening
that holds onto its darkness
the way we hold onto each other

like last night when a swarm of gulls appeared
white and frantic and I thought
they were stars breaking against the sky.

Babo Kamel’s poems have appeared in The Greensboro Review, Alligator Juniper, the Grolier Poetry Prize, Contemporary Verse 2, among others. She was a winner of the Charlotte A. Newberger Poetry Prize, for which her poem was published in Lilith. Originally from Montreal, she now resides in Venice, Florida.