Red Tea and Autumn Leaves

‘Don’t make it too red’ is one of those phrases you’ll sometimes heard passed between tea-drinkers when you’re making up milked tea. We’re guilty of doing exactly that, having more of a tendency to wave a milk jug in the vicinity of a teacup than to pour out from it. But tonight’s tea is red and it’s not remotely our fault.

Tulsi Tranquility features a number of red ingredients from rosehip to red currants, raspberries and strawberries. All it really tastes of are the currants, and it smells of cloves, though the ingredients assure us none feature. Personally, we have doubts. Anyway, it’s a tangy, tart tea that runs deceptively deep red very early on.

We drank it by hunting down a poem, which was mostly achieved tonight by putting rather particular combinations of words into the search engine in an effort to coax out something specific. So while tonight’s poem is thematically unlikely, we’re that pleased that we found it that you’re getting it anyway. Besides, it features the deep red of Canadian autumn. Consider it a tribute to the tea. Well, to the red tea and the fact that nowhere on earth does autumn like Canada.

Falling Leaves and Early Snow

Kenneth Rexroth

In the years to come they will say,

“They fell like the leaves

In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine.”

November has come to the forest,

To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen.

The year fades with the white frost

On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows,

Where the deer tracks were black in the morning.

Ice forms in the shadows;

Disheveled maples hang over the water;

Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream.

Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold.

The yellow maple leaves eddy above them,

The glittering leaves of the cottonwood,

The olive, velvety alder leaves,

The scarlet dogwood leaves,

Most poignant of all.

In the afternoon thin blades of cloud

Move over the mountains;

The storm clouds follow them;

Fine rain falls without wind.

The forest is filled with wet resonant silence.

When the rain pauses the clouds

Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls.

In the evening the wind changes;

Snow falls in the sunset.

We stand in the snowy twilight

And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud.

Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight,

Glimmering with floating snow.

An owl cries in the sifting darkness.

The moon has a sheen like a glacier.

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