COFFEE YARD

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We learn coffee here, students and I—

bananas chandeliered above the brown-earth yard,

two cows stamping mud and dung, the cooking shed,

the thatch and smoke, We’ve done

the work of it, schooled by the farmer: pinched

berries from squat green bushes, shredded

red-green husks in a crank-it machine,

pounded hard white kernels. Then roasting our beans

in a fire-black pot, crushing them, hot

and shiny into grounds with tall, wooden pestles

brought high over our heads in piston twos.

And now we drink the coffee, our coffee, take

photographs, make student-jokes—our laughter

like snapping glass, brittle and sharp

before the neighbor women at the coffee yard’s edge,

and the children who’ve come to watch us.

 

A young woman sits on a bench, leans against

the farmer’s house. She wears kanga—orange,

green, white—and cracked, flattened, yellow thongs.

A gray cat lies in her lap. She kneads

its front paws, her finders smoothing, squeezing up

to inner toes like a little dance,

the threading of a loom. Small girls

sit beside her, but it’s as if she’s alone—this time

to caress a cat, this moment of idel, this moment

brought by us, our being here. What does she think

of our blondes and blues, our daintiness,

our language she doesn’t know, or is

too shy to speak—we don’t speak to her?

 

The students mill, ready to go. But I smell cow,

wood smoke and fire, the coffee berry sap

on my fingers. Something inside me

has filled. I feel it in the well of my throat, the rounds

of my eyes, the meat of my lips, lips held open

of their own accord, like the girl’s, as she

watches us, her eyes pensive, alert, as if

she understands how we fit here, how we

do not, how she, how we might

explain this day, might explain such distance.