Brewed Beverage of Choice: A Pot of Chinese Green Tea
This morning as I sit in the local coffeehouse with my morning coffee, this time actually tea, and a book of poetry of Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize winner from Ireland, it struck me that poets are actually brewers, or farmers, or skyscraper builders, or even blacksmiths. To understand this, you would have to read the words written by Heaney from his poem “The Forge.”
All I know is a door into the dark./Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;/Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,/The unpredictable fantail of sparks/Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water./
Or take for another example this excerpt from Sandburg’s “Prairie”:
The frost loosens corn husks./The sun, the rain, the wind/loosen corn husks./The men and women are helpers./They are all conrhuskers together./I see them late in the western evening/in a smoke-red dust.
These are my favourite poets. The ones who can make sounds out of words. The ones who can bring to life the forge. They can turn the soil, build a city from bare hands, take grain and water and hops and brew some of the finest thoughts in the world and in the end no one would know they are reading poetry. Instead they are standing in the fields surrounded by cornstalks, or they are in the streets staring up at the buildings. They can smell the sulfur in the refinery. They can hear the hiss as the molten steel cools. They are the forgotten framers, often ignored because they speak a different dialect, but the feelings they invoke are boundless.
Prost!
the confucian brewer
(The following poem was inspired by the works of Seamus Heaney and is merely a first draft. I hope one day I will be not only a brewer of beer…)
Walking along the train tracks
in the valley, back of the house.
David and I jokingly state,
“If you put your ear to the rail
you can hear if a train approaches,”
knowing full well the train ceased
running on this line, oh, twenty years ago.
Jeff put his ear to the rail eager
for the sensation of approaching cars.
“I hear one coming!” he shouted
excitingly as we elbowed each other,
chuckling under our breath.
In the distance, a whistle blows,
leaving us all in stunned disbelief -
Were we liars or he a magician?