Green Tea by Dale Ritterbusch : American Life in Poetry

The Poetry Foundation

Library of Congress

University of Nebraska
at Lincoln

American Life in Poetry: Column 83

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Poems of simple pleasure, poems of quiet celebration, well, they aren’t anything like those poems we were asked to wrestle with in high school, our teachers insisting that we get a headlock on THE MEANING. This one by Dale Ritterbusch of Wisconsin is more my cup of tea.

Green Tea

There is this tea

I have sometimes,

Pan Long Ying Hao,

so tightly curled

it looks like tiny roots

gnarled, a greenish-gray.

When it steeps, it opens

the way you woke this morning,

stretching, your hands behind

your head, back arched,

toes pointing, a smile steeped

in ceremony, a celebration,

the reaching of your arms.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted from Far From the Temple of Heaven, Black Moss Press, April 2006, by permission of the author. Copyright © 2005 by Dale Ritterbusch. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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