False Aubade
By Lisa Compo
“False Aubade” by Lisa Compo is the first runner-up of the 2025 Nature Poetry Prize, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. We’re honored to share this evocative poem with you.
The foxgloves burnt beneath
_____June’s penance and I find a great imprint
__________of mulberries, ants amongst the wound
of it. An unpredictable coverage of cloud
_____and the possibility to catch
__________a meteor shower.
I sped to a disappearing marsh
_____and found rows of telescopes clustering
__________beside near-translucent crabs. Shadows
of bodies scattering beneath
_____the sand. The dark shore’s whisper
__________ crawling into a sigh. The ticks and flies
bit as if they were but wind—months
_____back, you stood still
__________as a starlit sky.
We didn’t know the contents,
_____only that there was enough faith
__________in it to keep the people up there
up there. Night collapsed into day. Silence fell,
_____somewhere a new dimension grew. The insects
__________and bats startled in the backwards
eclipse, you uttered Christ and it was
_____a spell. Night crawled into our welts, stung
__________sweat. The marsh was waking,
just enough to open its eye
_____at us. The dragonflies hummed
__________but nothing came of it. You were
dawn, it was only our hands, a sleeve
_____so unfamiliar as a lantern burned through—
__________we were awake and asleep, sound
in our terror. And at this edge, at genesis,
_____we hold onto someone.