Two Poems: Leafy Green Vegetables and Coffee Sestina

ABOUT THE POEM These long poems by Annie Zaidi declare their subjects in their titles: greens and coffee. But in both poems these substances (and the poetic forms employed to describe them) work a long trail through particular human stories and structures. At first it seems as if the speaker of “Leafy Green Vegetables” is composing an innocent health-homily, the kind that might be used to educate children in the rigours of healthy eating and in the pleasures of language and rhyme. But slowly a second figure begins to emerge in the poem, a listener different from the reader. This person seems to be furtive, submissive, a scrounger impoverished in both shell and spirit, pressured both by the hierarchies of his or her society and the grand schemes of the state. Even what hope he nurtures is “creeping”, after the manner of his body. Speaker and subject are united in a relationship of empathy; there is someone watching when the person in the poem “folds away the dream”. In “Coffee Sestina”, the voice we hear speaks from within the world of the poem; the person whom she addresses is also the source and sharer of the poem’s references to common experiences, pleasures, and discords. The poem is one of hopeful, even practical, pessimism: the speaker wants to make a new start by repeating something, to set up a ground of freedom and mutuality by proposing restraints. The word “coffee” pops up in each stanza, the central motif around which the speaker wheels and muses. In the “Come, let’s look for coffee” of the envoi—a sestina’s three-line close—it seems as if one coffee-cycle is over in the life of the speakers and another is about to begin.

Leafy Green Vegetables

Soak for a minute in hot water after you buy.

Wash. Drain dry.

Eat with bread if there is no rice.

Eat raw if there is no oil.

Eat with salt and mustard.

It tastes nice.

Tear off the bitter stem.

Tear off the blackened edge.

Tear off misgiving and eat

as if under pledge.

In the threshing season, wait for dusk.

Hide in the landlord’s shorn field.

Pick up grain buried

under brown hills of husk.

Scrub down the landlord’s cow.

Gather up her watery dung.

Dry the shit and piss.

Gather grain somehow.

Pluck a creeping hope off a creeping tree.

Wash hands before offering the census-takers your

wine-red tea.

If they ask how you live, answer wisely.

Find a corner to scratch in, plant a destiny.

Find a corner to stretch in after a noon meal.

Find a corner to scream in if a wound does not heal.

Keep your balance. Drown the drum if it drums extreme.

Remember at dawn to fold away the dream.

Remember to eat well. Buy a lot of greens.

Remember, remember your leafy green vegetables.

Coffee Sestina

Let us agree for once. Let’s stick to this and that,

gossip about celebrity, not look each other in the eye,

not repeat mistakes that bloat into the cruel

everyday songs we hum without bitterness.

Let’s not slip off our platonic track of coffee.

I’ll dig up my old smile; you can send me home in a train.

Tonight, let us go to some friendly café to train

ourselves in ways of meeting, speak in tongues that

we dared not use before—toss about jokes about your mother’s eye,

laugh without sadness at how our wisdom was cruelly

won on the streets. Let’s not say anything about being bitter.

We can drink ourselves blue one day. Tonight, stick with coffee.

There’s Monday to belt up against—exuberant moaning about the coffee

machine, recycled shit in the canteen, the intern who took eight months’ training

and went to a rival firm. The working week is a washboard that

bruises our face until we are too numb to look around with leaky eyes.

All week, I yank newspapers off the doormat, glance at other cruelties,

bigger calamities, and boil the morning tea until it grows bitter.

I talk to you of brothers and sisters to whom is pledged our citizen’s blood—bitter

bursts of gunfire; stoning; immolations; leaps from high-rises. Goat-shit coffee

becomes a new tonic, our private healing as we sing the nation’s blues, following trains

of damaged histories. Perhaps we will feel lucky. At least we are not content in that

horrid bourgeoisie way. At least there is hunger and pain shining in our eyes.

At least it’s not belladonna, or cocaine, or a sensex high, nothing so small or cruel.

Let’s admit we like being difficult. We are determined that everyday cruelty

and a worldly world will not change us. We’ll ask for jugs of milk to make bitter

Ethiopian brews palatable, for the world is full of unreasonable coffee.

It makes our gut lurch with disbelief. Once we have somehow trained

our tongues to grow sweet in recompense, we’ll settle for a fair trade brew that

costs too much. We’ll drink it, make a face, complain about dust, noise, dry eyes.

I promise. When you see me next, it will not be with monsoon eyes.

Just let the full moon wear out its fat peasant shine and drift into a cruel

eclipse, so my longing sees no luminous metaphor. Nothing but a bitter

black void. Just let this dense night slide off my balcony. I’ll brew some coffee,

pick up the phone. Your voice will be full with relief. I’ll take the train

down to your grubby, hustling suburb. And then, that will be that.

Remember, it began that way—a hustle in a grubby town grown bitter

with what it wants, cruel with what it couldn’t keep. Come, let’s look for coffee.

It’s hard to train the heart but, with time, our eyes will calmly learn to meet.