Share your favourite tea poetry!

For general/other topics related to tea.


Jan 20th, '14, 10:45
Posts: 11
Joined: Jan 18th, '14, 21:00
Location: Norway

Share your favourite tea poetry!

by teatre » Jan 20th, '14, 10:45

Do you have some tea poetry? Your own, a classic or maybe just an eloquent quote you like? Please share some with a newbie! :) Here are a couple of my favourites so far:
Seventy years of Zen -
I got nowhere at all
I shed my black robe
Became a shaggy crank.
I have no business with
The sacred or profane,
Selling tea is all I do -
It holds starvation off.
- Baisao
So hear it then, my Rennie dear,
Nor hear it with a frown,
You cannot make the tea so fast
as I can gulp it down.
- Samuel Johnson
(I have "The Old Tea Seller" on order by the way, looking forward to it!)

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Jan 20th, '14, 14:51
Posts: 178
Joined: Jun 30th, '13, 22:18
Location: Maryland

Re: Share your favourite tea poetry!

by kikula » Jan 20th, '14, 14:51

I collect 'em.

The best:

Tea is not but this.
First you make the water boil,
Then infuse the tea.
Then you drink it properly.
That is all you need to know.
Sen No-Rikyu

And this one, which reminds me of a wonderfully funny blog post by the indomitable MarshalN
http://www.marshaln.com/2012/02/rules-o ... tea-world/ :

A peerless tea from Chien Hsi,
emblazoned with phoenix and dragon,
one sip, worth its weight in gold,
dethrones your tongue forever.
You're welcome to taste it yourself,
right in the streets of the capital!
yet today it's the same old story,
I won't even cover my costs.
Baisao

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Jan 20th, '14, 15:00
Posts: 178
Joined: Jun 30th, '13, 22:18
Location: Maryland

Re: Share your favourite tea poetry!

by kikula » Jan 20th, '14, 15:00

And the Western way, with all due agita:

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of toast and tea
T.S. Eliot

We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven’t had any tea for a week…
The bottom is out of the Universe.
~Rudyard Kipling

:)

And then we grow old, or wise, or both:

Not one care in mind all year
I find enough joy every day in my hut
and after a meal and a pot of strong tea
I sit on a rock by a pond and count fish.
-Shih-wu

Jan 21st, '14, 03:47
Posts: 11
Joined: Jan 18th, '14, 21:00
Location: Norway

Re: Share your favourite tea poetry!

by teatre » Jan 21st, '14, 03:47

kikula wrote:I collect 'em. [...]
Those are all beautiful, kikula! Thank you for sharing
... which reminds me of a wonderfully funny blog post by the indomitable MarshalN
I guess I need to cancel that evil electricity thing and stock up on olive-pit charcoal and pu! :D

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Jan 21st, '14, 04:10
Posts: 489
Joined: May 11th, '13, 03:20
Location: Sacramento, California

Re: Share your favourite tea poetry!

by 茶藝-TeaArt08 » Jan 21st, '14, 04:10

Sitting In Quietude

Winter has a message of its own
When the cold is like a flower--
Flowers have their fragrance, Winter has its
handful of memories.
The shadow of a withered branch, like lean blue smoke,
Paints a stroke across the afternoon window.
In the cold the sunlight grows pale and slanted.
It's just like this.
I sip the tea quietly as if waiting for a guest to speak.

Lin Huiyin (1904-1955)
(translated by Michelle Yeh)

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Jan 21st, '14, 05:20
Posts: 489
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Location: Sacramento, California

Re: Share your favourite tea poetry!

by 茶藝-TeaArt08 » Jan 21st, '14, 05:20

From outside
through the window,
a moist breeze.
Wind in Maple leaves.
Garden chimes ring.
Distant bark of
a neighbor's dog.
Steel kettle gurgles steam.
Incense smoke in
sunset's slant light.
Shadows deepen
quiet tea sips.

奇山

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Jan 22nd, '14, 00:38
Posts: 489
Joined: May 11th, '13, 03:20
Location: Sacramento, California

Re: Share your favourite tea poetry!

by 茶藝-TeaArt08 » Jan 22nd, '14, 00:38

Tea Tasting

I like to sip sweet tea
a mix of peppermint and licorice--
amber gold and smooth as silk.
I have a silk shirt
that feels like that tea tastes.
It sits on my shoulders
like a warm breeze.
That tea tastes like Ramana's soft eyes
like Buddha's serene face.

People go looking far and wide
for the Buddha's enlightenment
but I just sip tea
and my tea swallows me.

The Buddha breaks into a grin
and Ramana winks one eye
like my grandfather did
when he knew that I knew
what he knew.

I like green tea too.
Strong and bitter
like the taste of grass.
Like tasting sure defeat--
the kind that you can
taste on the tip of your tongue
the kind that can change
your life on a dime
forever.
With each bitter sip
Manjushri's sword
cuts the mind to pieces
cuts it awake
and cuts awakeness
into emptiness.

People come here
and listen to my dharma words
when all I really want to do
is sell them a little tea.

(Adyashanti)

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Jan 22nd, '14, 01:01
Posts: 489
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Location: Sacramento, California

Re: Share your favourite tea poetry!

by 茶藝-TeaArt08 » Jan 22nd, '14, 01:01

There Are Those Who Love To Get Dirty

There are those who love to get dirty
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work,

And those who stay clean,
just appreciate things,
At breakfast they have milk
and juice at night.

There are those who do both,
they drink tea.

(Gary Snyder)

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Jan 22nd, '14, 21:51
Posts: 178
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Location: Maryland

Re: Share your favourite tea poetry!

by kikula » Jan 22nd, '14, 21:51

Oho, very good ones, TeaArt!

Gary Snyder, great poet!
He quit on Chogyam
'cause his shy and beautiful
Japanese wife
was so embarrassed
by Dharma guards
in FBI suits
who tried to make her
remove her clothes
for the cool retreatants
to prove she was relaxed and open
and dharmic.
She resisted, all hell broke loose.
Ginsberg stayed.
Rexroth left.
I, a nobody, left.
Lotta booze at Chogyam's, crazy.
Don't remember any tea.
Plenty qui.
Depressed Tibetans, drunk Americans, sit sit sit sit.
Qui amok.

What, TA, I should maybe stop with the dharma gossip? :)

Adyashanti! Also a great poem!
I love Adyashanti.
Very young!
A friend paid lots of money,
weekend retreat.
Adyashanti just sat there, wouldn't say anything.
Good teaching.
But I know where to get it for free.

Which rhymes with tea.
Ha.

Tonite no tea, Christmas-present Port!
Can you tell?
Hic and hoc.
:) :) :)

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Jan 23rd, '14, 01:26
Posts: 489
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Location: Sacramento, California

Re: Share your favourite tea poetry!

by 茶藝-TeaArt08 » Jan 23rd, '14, 01:26

Ah Kikula.... :lol: ,

Port, that is my wife's favorite poison these days. We have no less than 5 bottles of decent port in the wine rack right now. My wife's recuperation habit includes me drawing a bath for her, bath salts, candles, a little incense, some Enya, and a glass (or was it two?) of port.

Dharma + gossip...interesting combination, and certainly not a rare one perhaps, in certain circles. Seems you've seen the underbelly of American Buddhism. I had a professor, a brilliant scholar on Buddhism (Prof. Lai) whom spent a lot of time discussing the fact that American Buddhism should be classified as something else all together. Gary Snyder, I've run into him a few times through the years. I spent 8 or so years studying Deep Ecology with George Sessions and he and Gary were in contact as Deep Ecologists, specifically during the run of The Wild Duck Review. I'd run into him drinking tea in Nevada City or at a shared reading with Jane Hirshfield. But, indeed, do tell. Rexroth, I appreciate his work (For Eli Jacobsen), perhaps, most. I would have loved, perhaps, to sit buzzed on wine beneath a moon watching the sea with him, saying nothing or lounging pensively beneath "hazy girders" in the Sierra reflecting on the lost loves of his life. But who knows.

Ironically, not tea for me tonight either, just a half glass of port after watching Kung Fu Panda with my four year old son...a more than strange reality (I forget to remember) after many years alone in the rich Yellow Pine Belt forests of the Sierra Nevada as a hermit, and in the great quiet of granite expanses....but the "dusty world" too has its pleasures doesn't it.

Salutations!!

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Jan 23rd, '14, 21:39
Posts: 178
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Location: Maryland

Re: Share your favourite tea poetry!

by kikula » Jan 23rd, '14, 21:39

And prosit, TA, to you and your fortunate wife. Lots to talk about here but we'll tug the promising thread OT if we get to going, with our interesting memories and notable acquaintances and all, won't we? Deep ecology, ya, but my projections tend dystopic, someone needs to write a novel called Gaia Shrugged - he's right, your excellent friend, we are too many, and she'll tumble us off her back when we go too far, OK by me.

Here's to all of those memories and all of those anticipations and all of the world in one drop of tea.

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