This is Michael Carey for Voices from the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s poet is Barbara Lau who teaches at Cornell College in beautiful Mount Vernon in eastern Iowa just north of Iowa City. Her poem is Aubade/ Iowa. An aubade is a love song whose setting is dawn. Who or what the poem is in praise or celebration of I’ll leave you to decide.

October, 9 a.m., two hundred miles from the nearest
skyscraper, the sky
is a stillborn blue. Aphid-white stalks
of corn, dry as parchment, sizzle in the fields,
quieter now that the crickets have fled.

I credit my daughter for this morning’s lapse
into slowe motion. We meander five miles
on dirt and gravel, headed for Venda’s,
the only sitter she will tolerate.
Try driving faster than thirty

and you’ll spin out like a toy top
on a brick sidewalk.
(I know this for a fact.)
Sometimes the going’s so slow,
I ache, I taste dust in every dusty corner.

But Lily’s undaunted, starkly alive, whooping
at a tribe of domesticated turkeys.
Their every step is deliberate, emphatic,
almost graceful in their resolve
not to be rushed. Unlike the five — no, eight, no nine —

deer clustered along the berm.
Looking perpetually startled, ears taut
as a cocked trigger, expecting, if not danger,
then something short of mercy.
We creep to a stop, mother and daughter watching

doe and fawn watching mother and daughter.
Each waiting to see who will make the next move.
(Have I always been so impatient, so blind?)
I find that highways were built for one good reason
that speed alone can’t measure.

"Aubade/ Iowa" by Barbara Lau is from The Long Surprise published by Texas Review Press.

For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.

Barbara Lau teaches English and Creative Writing at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. She holds a MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson and an MA in English from the University of Illinois. Her poetry has appeared in Field, Spoon River Poetry Review, Karamu, Southern Poetry Review, Poet Lore, Iron Horse Literary Review, and other journals, plus the anthology When I Grow Old I Shall Wear Purple. She lives with her husband, composer and jazz guitarist Don Chamberlain, and daughters Grace and Lily.