J.V. Cunningham: ‘Coffee’

 I get up before the rest of the house to drink coffee, to be quiet, to be alone and to think. It’s a ritual for many people, and J.V. Cunningham wrote a poem about it that includes these lines: 

           I have so often fled

           Wherever I could drink

           Dark coffee and there read

           More than a man would think.

 

If your notion of goodness or happiness requires some benefit for the common good, this is a waste of time. But the poet claims the coffee hour is his time.

 

           I waste it for the waste.

 

• Source: The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, edited by Timothy Steele; Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1997.