EXCITING NEWS!

I've yet to share this with you all, but I got into English 80 at my school, which is the intro creative writing course. What does this mean? POETRY IS MY HOMEWORK! It's wonderful, it's actually multitasking to upkeep this blog! What I'll be doing is posting all the poems I write for that class up here to share with you guys, starting with the one today. Our first assignment was to write a poem that "meanders" a bit before it gets to its meaning (I write a lot of these poems, but they all have to be fresh. So no recycling allowed). This poem I wrote today on the subject of tea. I'm an avid tea drinker and probably drink more of it than any of your European grandmothers. I've never utilized tea as a metaphor in my poetry, let alone think about the symbolism that it can convey. And I like it. You will definitely see more poems about tea in the future.

Side note: the teas I describe in the end of the first stanza are white tea (made from baby tea leaves, I like to think of it as young tea), rooibos (not really tea but an herbal variety, full flavored and very energetic, for lack of a better word), Gunpowder tea (usually a green tea, which is mature leaves, named so because of how they're packaged to look like bullets and often stored in metal containers), and Pu-erh (oolong tea fermented in caves, most oxidized, "oldest" tea leaf I suppose). They are in some ways different stages in the tea's life, as well as humans (birth, adolescence, war, death).

You now know more about tea than you probably ever cared about.

DepraviTea

In under three minutes, a teakettle
Produces a raspy postlude.
The leaves bloom in the heat,
Their diffusion, their perfumes
Caress the clarity, suggest a mood:
Simple white, clean and sincere,
Rooibos from Bourbon Street.
A musket green with notes of metal,
Oolong stored in tombs.
But the actual tea is one to fear.

Harmful if swallowed. Do not ingest.

Once it is tossed, no one grieves.
The essence is the sole value.
We drink our tea with little haste,
Unaware of travesties,
Incognizant of our profanity,
The sin we never knew.
Are we steeped tealeaves?
Are we the this kind of humanity,
Exploited of our victories,
And then left to waste?

storm clouds

So it's been both storming and beautiful here, so I figured it'd be appropriate to post this poem about a spring thunderstorm I wrote last May. Yay storms. Yay.... walking in the rain.

storm clouds

whatever Verdant in our mists
tonight lies prey to grips severe
and splinters borne out from fists
of a thunderhead austere.
the air is trembling in fear.

the hairs rise straight on backs of Grass
and the blades sharpen and hum a tune,
synonymous with the pitch of glass
clamoring in the choir of june,
far too loud to spy the moon.

white flowers are born from Sickly skies
and bloom downwards in a spiral of mirth.
the pearls as petals fall in guise
to give false richness to the earth
as clouds draw close to cinch and girth.

in curtains too wet to be couth
this much i learn from heavy scenes,
for this is thunderstorm time’s truth:
since the wind does carry the Leaves it gleans,
violence is attracted to Greens.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre