Vietnam Coffee

(A Poem Inspired by an Essay on Vietnam’s Coffee History, titled ‘Cold War Coffee,’ Written by Max Lawson, and Circulated by Professor R. Sudarshan)

At dawn, postcolonial ceilings exhale;
Dim drip-drops echo in quiet sundry halls;
A baguette’s crust and spoonsful of cherry
Summon the porcelain’s clink like silver palls.

The crafty shadows of comrades’ handshakes
Sip slow the tangled froth of history’s dark drop,
As red-faced ploughs seduce the furrowed brows,
Of a stubborn terrain to bear a crop.

Bleak roast and bitter crush engrave the cups;
Steam twirls like riddles in a frayed courtyard.
Scorched wainscots droop in the morning’s refrain,
Woolgathering for Vietnam’s unarrived bard.

Coffee, rye, chicory blend in brittle cosmogony;
Tin-bright dairy spills helium in the brew;
Lacquered lights lick the hotel’s old lush,
As iced youth turn dreams to electric dew.

Rusted valves smell of iron-laced rivers,
Of uprooted tastes, the morning eschews;
Sweet solders sealing wounds that wars have spun,
As sea-salt settles on the chin of a muse.

Fog maps the noon—black flood, scarlet spark—
Some more butter for the woebegone tiles?
It may help preserve the grief cool and clipped,
Like the ersatz memories of exiles.

At dusk, the ruddy moon spins like a coin,
Or wistful white broods who fear other races;
Green algae climb like a peeping visitor,
Over the Berlin Wall’s traces.

An Oxfam hand pens the brown-eyed boy’s plight,
With beans falling to a thirty-year descent;
Vietnam flies second in the global flight,
Flooding bazaars with its unwelcome vent.

Vietnam coffee is the condensed milk
Of Hanoi’s seances; cold lattes on the go;
Of somber lore; a colony, a commune,
A factory’s pandemonium, in an ounce of snow.