A Cup of Clarity

An hour to kill.
Stirring honey into amber tea
Watching while its thick ribbons
Of sugar disappear beneath the steam
That wafts up in jasmine.

I wait while sixty minutes unwind in waves of jazz.
I hear, and each minute, like each note
Is senseless and beautiful.

Now is the time to think the things
We said we’d think about later,
The questions we’d ask later,
The answers we’d find later
When we have time to sip tea slowly
Without burning our soft tongues.

And in this time of silence,
Cradled and breakable,
I want to rearrange the notes
To equate a symphony,
And set the minutes to repeat
So I can roll ribbons of confusion
Into a cup of clarity
And stir until they melt away.

Jaidyn Martin, Northwestern College (St. Paul, Minnesota). Reprinted by permission from Inkstone, Fall 2003.