There
is something insoluble in my tea that you poured
I
don’t know what it is. Could be a memory of the cold tea in our China village
of Nan On, in the bedroom on the teakwood table from the teapot spout I drink
in childhood as a schoolboy, when our rooster crowed daylight, when getting up
to the winter cold air was the first test of the day…
The
tea is hot now like the anger I feel in this country when called a racial
epithet. This country now has lost all its rights to be a world citizen, and in
self-defense, I must be a world citizen and not a denizen of this country,
where the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” came from motherland
Shakespeare…
But
more than this, it took me so long to find you, like a rose surrounded by
brambles and a yellow chrysanthemum just beyond my height, radiant, that across
my childhood years, the pond water was the right tepid temperature to swim in,
and the love of ferns I found in these woods nearby as I wandered into it to
the hidden waterfall we called the Diamond Falls, near the PUD in Aberdeen, on
the foothills of the Olympics, where Darren the Native American fellow would
disappear for a month at a time with bow and arrow to test the survival skills
of his forebears, like I surreptitiously read the Chinese dictionary to see
familiar faces, all 50,000 of them…
But
long ago I also received my first rejection in a box of a phone booth when she
sent icy words up my spine, as the winter booth is fogging up with my breath.
Tea is pronounced incorrectly by foreigners as the Cantonese dialect has 9
tones, and each tone has a different meaning and “cha” could mean error…
But
later I came back to my native culture when my poem, “A Smoke Break at the
Nuclear Command,” was published in the Hong Kong online journal “Cha.” So now
comparing cultures and phonics I found your love is quenching of thirst as the
land of tea…
All
in all, our love is not a mistake, after a lifetime of them, and now as we
sprout snow on our heads, we find that insoluble stuff in my tea is love…
Koon
Woon, April 18, 2026, Seattle
