The Sorrow of Birds Coffee About John Sokol

John Sokol The Sorrow of Birds Mourning doves coo in the eaves and a woodpecker stutters for a grub on the telephone pole outside your window. Wrens chatter on the wire while sparrows and chickadees shiver in the dead bushes. A woman across the street is sweeping away the quilt of snow some starlings stitched on her porch, and in the field beside her house, a dozen crows scream from treetops as young boys fling something frozen and flat -- like a black frisbee -- back and forth, across the white ground. Coffee -- discovered by Kaldi, Arabian goatherder, in 850 A.D. O alchemy of bean and water and black acidic gurgle-song; café/diner, morning mantra, and tongue-smack nasal-balm; tacit brew of brain-jolt; stimuli-steam of the neuron crew. O coffee, coffee; bitter elixir: Kenya, Kona, Mocha Java, Columbian, Hawaiian and all the rest. Thank you, Kaldi! Balzac surely holds the record for most cups consumed in a lifetime: forty cups a day, of the blackest, thickest, Turkish sort. And then there was J.S. Bach, who, into his Coffee Cantata, poured the greatest tribute to the liquid's honor. But, hey, you and I have drunk to the cause as well: a hangover cure the morning after our wedding day; two cups spilled over our legs that Thanksgiving we hit a patch of ice on I-90; sipped through heads of whipped milk and cinnamon how many mornings in bed; and, then (remember?), all those cups we drank at the Court House, the day we said goodbye. - The Advocate, Vol. 8, # 1, Feb./Mar, 1994 Prattsville, NY John Sokol is a writer and painter living in Akron, OH. His poems have appeared in America, Antigonish Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Georgetown Review, New Millennium Writings, The New York Quarterly, and Quarterly West, among others. His short stories have Appeared in Akros, Descant, Mindscapes, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Redbook, and other journals. One of his stories has been translated into Danish, and, another, into Russian. His drawings and paintings have been reproduced on more that thirty-five book covers. His chapbook Kissing the Bees won the 1999 Redgreene Press Chapbook Competition, and is available from Amazon.