19 Varieties of Gazelle: First Response

For my first readers response I wanted to focus on the poem “Arabic coffee”. I especially enjoyed this poem because it reminds me of my own father, and times that we have shared together. I started drinking coffee because I wanted to be just like my father; he would always wake up promptly at 5:30 AM and would drink his coffee with two creams and two sugars. This poem is also about how coffee brought people together throughout their hardships. No matter what kind of struggles my father was going through at the time, he would always wake up, 5:30 AM and drink his coffee with two creams and two sugars. The sense of consistency always brought me a sense of serenity. When I started going to an out of town high school, I had to start waking up at 5:30 AM, and I started spending my mornings with my father, drinking my coffee with more than two creams and two sugars, but still learning from him. Those mornings were spent watching the news, discussing plans and how the family was doing. While I was in high school my father lost his job, but we still spent our mornings together. In the poem “Arabic coffee” there is a line about “the hundred disappointments… and the dreams tucked like pocket handkerchiefs into each day”. This reminds me that no matter how much was going against him, my father would always wake up every day, 5:30 AM, and he would bear all the weight of the problems, and just keep going on.