Tea and Poetry

As it happens, I make the best damned iced tea in the world--and all more or less by accident. Comparative shopping over the years has brought me to Tazo Darjeeling as the only Darjeeling readily available in America that gives perfect satisfaction for my morning, two-teabag cuppa. That's with three heaping teaspoon-and-a-halfs of sugar and close to three quarters of a cup of whole milk. Once a day, first thing in the morning, it's heavenly. But for my mid-morning and late afternoon theine jolts, I find, Darjeeling with milk and sugar just doesn't do it. Doesn't taste the same. Doesn't even properly cheer and elevate. My perfect morning Tazo Darjeeling at any other hour of the day is, in point of brute fact, cloying. So I switch to green tea, jasmine, or oolong--and even here, in this climate, there are dissatisfactions, chiefly with the temperature: Hot tea, however exquisite, in the late morning and afternoon heats of Honolulu, is enervating. So iced tea. But which iced tea?--or rather, which tea iced? Jasmine, my first choice--aged Hippy that I am--I have found the actual experience of to be rather nauseating as iced tea. And every other kind of green tea, iced, seems, well, insipid. So, last time shopping at Longs' Drugs, they being out of even honestly sickening jasmine tea, I bought a box of Tazo 'Om' tea--which even the Tazo peoples' promotional literature describes as being something very odd--a combination of black and green tea (yech!) with "added flavors of cucumber and ripe peach" (double yech!), which brewed double-strength, with Sicilian lime juice and lots of sugar, over ice in a tall glass, is simply wonderful. And so refreshing! at any hour of the day.

But having got the minutiae of our pick-us-ups squared off, let us turn to one of the truly important and interesting matters that our being picked up enables us to appreciate: Our friend and colleague's, Dr. Jean Waggoner's poetry. All this while, while I knew that Jean sometimes went off to prestigious poetry workshops for weeks at a time, like that in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, and presumably wrote poetry there (in Spanish) it never occurred to me that my old friend Jean was a poet, as such.
Well, yesterday, apparently having just won Wilda Morris's November Poetry Challenge with it, Jean sent me her prize-winning poem, Two Fabaceae, which happily and proudly, I transcribe:

Asia Minor's acacia is praised in song,

Akasya Kolulu Sabahlarlinda,

"Acacia perfumed mornings."

Taller than Bosporus roofs, bristling

and swooshing in high summer winds,

It drinks modestly of autmn rains,

thriving in earth starved of nutrients,

yet graciously hosting the bulbul's nest

amid a sweet pea scent

so redolent of green Byzantium.

Its cousin, Southwest mesquite,

so much smaller in leaf and twig,

sequesters debris from its windy terrain,

and savors a crush of agave at its roots.

A dusty vaquero of high chaparral,

it repels avian histrionics with a forbidding

scratch of thorns and cook-fire brush,

while the flavor it imparts to barbecue

insinuates a deadly carcinogen

into biped carnivores' meals.

Both arbors are Fabaceae,

subfamily Mimosoideae --

Fabaceae, Mimosoideae,

Mimosoideae, Fabaceae --

and here's the rub: while both engender beans;

one is host to the nightingale,

the other a repellent shrub.

-- Jean Waggoner