The Life Within a Coffee Cup

What secrets, what friendships, what memories hide in your paper-thin porcelain?

Your gently tilted handle, designed for comfort during contemplation

Your fluted rim, so velvet-smooth, like a lover’s kiss on my lower lip

Small, faded flowers, strewn about like lonely little pleas, “forget me not”

The soft tinkling sound you make returning to your plate, like rainfalls remembered

Hidden within you are all the times my mother cried.

Your fragile frame, lifting her soul with the comfort of something familiar

Reminding her of home, on the other side of the world

Drawing the people she loved and the places she missed somehow closer

“Be careful with it!” She’d say, “It’s a Haviland.”

As though my tiny hands were connected to anything that could understand

How one tiny cup could hold the weight of a long-lost life

But I knew you were precious.

She found you at a garage sale, small miracle, intact.

She bathed you and tenderly washed you in ways I understood as love.

I saw her first full cup, the closing of her eyes, the tears as she stood at the kitchen window

What comfort to a poor mother with nothing to call her own

What delicate assurances you gave to her

That life could hold more than pain and sorrow

That grace could be consumed in six-ounce portions,

That God could love her enough to help her find you and take you home

In exchange for the dime she’d found on the ground while walking to church

And now you are mine.

Mom, I assume, is enjoying heavenly Haviland cups of coffee.

As I sit here, admiring you.

Wondering, beyond my sphere, whose lives you have touched.

How many years did you spend in a box, waiting to be who you are

Empty, capacious in the cabinet of a home with too many cups

Protected from daily use, from hands that hold, from lips that touch,

And from eyes that fill with tears

As they stare out kitchen windows to far-away worlds

Sipping warm reminders of God’s love…

Gott sei Dank für den Groschen auf der Straße,

den sie ausgegeben hab für diese Kaffeetasse!