POETRY JAM - SAVOUR THE FOOD

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” - T. S. Eliot
 
Poetry Jam this week has asked participants to: “Write a culinary poem. Write about your favorite food, a special meal you remember, a family recipe that has been passed over the years. Your poem can be literal or metaphorical, simple or complex…”
Here is my offering:
 

Drinking Bitter Coffee at the Café of Broken Promises
 
Quite by chance, I went by the Café
Where once – a lifetime ago – we had sought
Shelter from Autumn rain.
I wandered in, half expecting to see you smiling,
Beckoning me from that same booth
That we had shared, while grey afternoon wore on,
And rain, thankfully, kept falling...
 

We shook the rain off our hair – I remember –
And how we laughed, as the tabletop was spread
With hundreds of diamonds: Raindrops that caught
The pale yellow light of the bare bulb above,
Shattering its puny glow into a million sunrays
That illumined richly for that moment
The deepest cellars of our souls.
 

We sipped the steaming coffee and it was sweet nectar,
Although we clean forgot to sugar it.
Our legs brushed under the table
And your eyes promised me a hundred happinesses;
“Tomorrow...” you had whispered and I only smiled,
My silence more eloquent than a thousand pictures...
 

I order coffee yet again this Spring morning
And though the sun shines brightly outside,
I am sure I can hear the drumming of rain on the tin roof.
I lose count of the lumps of sugar
I am drowning in my cup, but each sip of coffee
Is more bitter than the one before it.
 

I stretch my legs beneath the table
Encountering a bottomless abyss,
While from the neighbouring booth, someone laughs,
And says quite loudly: “It was yesterday!”
 

By chance, I find myself once again
Drinking bitter coffee in some city Café;
A tawdry, cheap, noisy, smoky place,
Where one would never go to more than once...