A Cup of Tea
Smoky amber in a cup.
Wisps of memory rising with the steam.
Snowflakes just beyond the lacy curtain,
Secret radiance to dispel the cold.
Such comfort was not always mine.
No lace curtains in our farmhouse--
Hardly more than a shanty.
Three rooms and an entry down,
A slope-roofed bedroom up
Where my sisters slept with
Icicles through February.
My mother gave me green tea
In an antique china cup.
I was only four or five, but privileged...
Entrusted as I was with china and ritual.
I don't remember what she said,
I just remember Lipton's
Was a passport to another place,
And someday I would go there.
I have a samovar from Asia.
I have a teacup from Siam.
A copper mug from Queenstown in Tasmania.
Leaves in a tin embossed with words I cannot read,
But they can read them in Taiwan.
The world is such a massive, huge, tremendous place
And I have circumnavigated it.
It was much more difficult for Drake;
Magellan, too.
But adventure is adventure.
Where you'll get a taste for it--
Who knows?
For me it was a rundown farmhouse on a hill,
I was only four or five...
Jean Doolittle
I'm going to close out the April poetry journey with one of the first poems I wrote that gave me a sense of why I write and maybe a small idea of why others write as well.
We spend a lot of our time growing up trying to figure out who we are, what motivates us and where we want to go. We wonder about our unique hopes, dreams, loves and hates.
In a world where coffee shops are ubiquitous and (at least during the earlier hours of the day) coffee is a social lubricant, I eschew the java and prefer tea. I wrote this poem to explore this preference and in the process, I had an epiphany. While creating the previous day's entry, I watched Mark Vinz talking about his process and he cited James Joyce's concept of epiphanies..."a sudden spiritual manifestation", in other words "a visionary moment of sudden insight that changes their understanding of themselves or their comprehension of the world"
So, in writing about how tea became important to me, I felt how the experience may have created in me the desire from a very young age to see all the wonders of the world. My childhood was limited by the world you could see between morning milking and evening milking; but I knew that the world was out there.
At this time in my life, I have been to 48 states and 45 countries. I have lived on the shore of the South Pacific Ocean, seen the peaks of the Himalayas and slept in the Afghanistan desert. There is still more to see, more to discover and always more poems to broaden our horizons.
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